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cellioThere was a bat mitzvah Friday night. If I had known about this (or, more properly, remembered -- I'd seen an announcement before Pennsic and forgotten), I wouldn't have gone after the experience of that annoying Friday-night bar mitzvah a couple months back. But by the time I discovered this it was too late to go somewhere else (and be on time), so oh well.
This one went much better. It did not intrude to the extent that the previous one did; it was still recognizable as our congregation's Shabbat service, instead of being a show revolving around the kid. (I still hope we don't see this sort of thing often, though. These should really be done Saturday morning.)
At the oneg the rabbi told me something to the effect of "that worked much better than last time, eh?". I hadn't complained about the previous one, but I guess he knows me well enough by now to have predicted that. :-) He also told me there are some changes that he's going to insist on from now on, like keeping it down to three aliyot instead of seven. If the family wants seven, they can do it on Saturday morning like they're supposed to anyway. And he's leaning on families hard to keep the thank-yous and the "parental greeting" short. (This was the main source of the annoyance last time.)
I think I actually got this information, unsolicited, because I'm (nominally) co-chair of the worship committee. Gee, that turned out to be handy for something!
The girl's sermon was actually pretty well done (albeit short). This week's portion includes what's called the "tochecha", the long section of dire curses that will befall Israel if they don't keep God's commandments. (Deut. 29, for the curious.) So she talked about what motivates people under different circumstances and pointed out that there are actually three motivators, not the two that immediately come to mind: reward, punishment, and obligation. By the last, she means doing something because it's the right thing to do and not because of rewards (or punishments) that will come. Not a new thought to most adults, I suspect, but it was nice to hear this coming from a 13-year-old.
The morning Torah-study group has just reached
the discussion of kashrut in Leviticus, so
Rabbi Freedman brought some thoughts from a
(modern) source that I didn't note on the
question of "why these food laws?". A lot of
people think kashrut is about health, but that's
not really it. This source offered the theory that
we are forbidden to eat animals that have characeristics
we would not want to emulate -- e.g. we don't eat
carnivores because people should not kill aggressively,
we don't eat lions because they're seen as proud,
we don't eat scavengers, etc. ("You are what you eat"
taken to new levels?) This sounds weak to
me for two reasons: (1) there are forbidden animals
without obvious "problematic" characteristics, and
(2) if that were the reason, it wouldn't
just be about food -- we'd be forbidden to benefit
from those animals in any way, or so I suspect.
While the answer "because God said so" is usually unpopular in liberal Judaism, sometimes I think it's the correct answer. There will always be some commandments for which we can't discern a reason, after all. (There's even a name for them -- chukim.)
(no subject)
Date: 2002-08-25 01:43 pm (UTC)There's explanation which I've heard, but don't feel like tracking down the source to. (I will if you really want me to). It's that kosher animals are ones which fit in a category. I.e. edibal herd animals are supposed to have cloven hooves and chew their cud. Fish are supposed to have fins and scales. Things that break these categories (fish without scales, herd animals without cloven hooves, etc., drove our obssesive-compulsive ancestors nuts.
(no subject)
Date: 2002-08-26 08:52 am (UTC)The problem with this theory is that there are forbidden categories, too, such as "scavengers". Categorization is a useful memory aid, but it's hard to make a case for it as source here.