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Shabbat
He talked about the part of the Yom Kippur liturgy that begins "On Rosh Hashana it is written, on Yom Kippur it is sealed, who shall live and who shall die, who shall die by fire and who by flood, who by..." and so on for a dozen or more unpleasant options. This has always bothered him, he said, because good people die -- in fact, everyone dies. So how can death, let alone manner of death, be tied to our own sins? (I've asked those questions too.)
His approach (which I am not going to capture here especially well, unfortunately) is that we should view the whole idea of being sealed for life as being how we seal our futures, and particularly how we're seen after we die. Will people say that we led good lives? It was eloquent and it made sense, though I now can't remember exactly how he got there from the liturgy quoted above. I didn't take notes. :-) (And I noticed that he wasn't working from a prepared copy, just notes. So I'm not going to score a copy.)
At the oneg I told him that he had impressed me, and he seemed a little surprised. C'mon; I'm not that stingy with compliments. :-)
This morning went differently than I had expected. Our rabbi was there for the whole service (no bar mitzvah), so he had been planning to read torah. I reminded him that he'd given me this portion; we ended up deciding that he would lead the entire service but I would read torah. Works for me. There were some communication glitches, though; after we decided that I assumed that my only responsibility was the torah reading, while he apparently thought I was going to read haftarah and maybe give a little talk.
(On that last, it's customary for the torah reader to give a short, maybe one-minute, introduction to the portion. When we got to that part he started to talk, then stopped and asked me if I had something prepared. I said "go ahead", because I'm happy to defer to him. I should make sure he didn't interpret that as some sort of "don't mind me; I'll just sit here in the dark" comment. I feel funny giving any sort of scholarly-type talk in front of my rabbi and teacher; I really was happy to have him do it.)
I made one mistake during the torah reading -- I misread a dalet as a reish, and have done so from the beginning. Bah! I shouldn't have done that; I even use a magnifying glass when learning from the tikkun. I guess I was so focused on the tiny little vowels and trope marks that I missed the huge honking consonant. Sigh. He didn't correct me during the reading, but he did point it out later. Oops. (It's a small difference between said huge honking consonants -- perhaps akin in scope to the difference between "O" and "Q" in some hands. It's a little more subtle than that, but there aren't any good examples in the Roman alphabet. "O" vs "0" is too far in the other direction.)
One of the other torah readers complimented me afterwards and asked how I get the text to flow so smoothly. I said that the trope does that; you've got to think of it as a melody, not little independent melodic fragments. I've heard her read and she sounds reasonable to me; when she stumbles I thought it was because she was stumbling over text, not trope. But at some point after the holidays we'll get together with the same portion so we can figure out what we do differently. Maybe I'm filling in small grace notes or ornaments or something, though I don't think so. There's also something to be said for understanding the text you're reading, on a word-by-word basis, but I think her Hebrew is a lot better than mine so I don't think that's it.
I'm still working out the culinary subtleties of Shabbat lunch. Dani asked me a couple months ago if I could not use the crock pot every week, because he doesn't care for a lot of the things that work well in a crock pot. The comment is contrary to my observation (I mean, he seems to like beef stew and chili; maybe he just doesn't like crock-pot chicken), but I'm trying to do what I can to accommodate him. Today's effort involved salmon loaf and potato kugel, kept in a 180-degree oven wrapped tightly in foil (to keep moisture in), but they were both too overcooked anyway. Since I hadn't tried this experiment before I also had plenty of gefilte fish and salads on hand, so there was no risk of going hungry.
There are usually just the two of us, so I haven't experimented much with the "huge slab of meat" approach. We've had some lunches with cold foods (gefilte fish, deli meats, etc), but especially as we approach winter I'd like to have more hot foods. Cholent is an obvious candidate, though I don't know how oven-cooked cholent would really differ from crock-pot-cooked cholent. Other suggestions are most definitely welcome. The oven is not programmable, unfortunately, so whatever temperature it starts Shabbat at is where it has to stay. And we can't cook on Shabbat, so whatever we're eating has to be cooked to the level of basic edibility before Shabbat. (No sticking the frozen slab of raw meat into the oven Friday night...) What do other people do?
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Do you not have gabbais in your congregation? I'm not familiar with Reform practice on this one.
Can't help you out with the food issue, as I am happy with cold and told my wife she can use the microwave to reheat... I tried a cholent once; the less said, the better.
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Here in Israel, most people use a large electric hot plate, it's about the size of the stovetop. It's gets food really hot, and people keep urns on it as well, to have hot water. But since most of them get hot enough, but not hot enough (there are halachic guidlines), you can place food on top of it Shabbat morning (other than liquids). In the smmer, I keep it on a timer, a few hours in the evening, a few in the morning so it doesn't add heat tot he house. In the winter, I tend to let it run all Shabbat to add some heat to the house.
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I should have thought of a hot plate on a timer. Thanks! I'll have to acquire a hot plate soon; it'll open up all sorts of possibilities. (Particularly for the summer, as you point out.)
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It's permissable according to many opinions to reheat *dry* food. Dry means more or less dry to the touch - not swimmng in liquid. Kugel qualifies. So would, I would think, salmon loaf. Chicken removed from its juices. Rice. Put them in the warm oven before shul.
This creates a huge number of possibilities. Arroz con pollo, for example, or chicken paprikash. Both are dry enough to qualify but reheat beautifully. Shepherd's pie. Meat loaf and mashed potatoes (no gravy, alas). Kugel, of course. Chicken pieces.
Oh. And it *is* permissable to put the frozen slab of meat in the cholent just before Shabbat, according to many opinions. Since you're not going to eat it until lunch, apparently it's okay to do it. I'm not sure of the reasoning, but I was told that by a chasidic friend. And lots of people start their cholents just before Shabbat. I don't make cholent, so I don't think about that. I do the reheating dry food thing.
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When I made cholent for the first time (I don't do this a lot), the recipe I followed called for bringing the meat and liquid to a boil before Shabbat, and then throwing in everything else and letting it cook slowly. I had assumed that was a halachic concern rather than a culinary one, but it wasn't specified so I don't know.
Do you have a recipe you like for chicken paprikash, by the way? Dani's favorite involves sour cream, which isn't happening in my kitchen. :-)
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3 large onions, diced
3 tbsps oil
salt
pepper
2 stalks celery, chopped.
1 tomato, diced
1 green pepper, diced.
1 heaping tsp paprika
2 whole chicken breast fillet
1.5 cups water
1.25 cups rice
Saute the onions until soft. Add the vegetables. When they're soft, add the paprika. Stir while cubing the chicken. Add the chicken. Simmer (add water if necessary) for about fifteen minutes. When the chicken is cooked, add the water and the rice. Bring to boil, and put, covered in a 350 oven until rice is cooked. Or keep on top of the stove.
I use brown basmati rice. I've used leftover chicken, and I've used a couple tablespoons of tomato paste, and I like red peppers better than green.
I'm making it for Simchat Torah, which we celebrate next Sunday. The evening service lasts a long time, and I'd rather have a hot meal waiting for us, so I'll slip it into the oven as soon as it's officially Sunday and go to synagogue.
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Cholent is, fundamentally, beef stew, so at least you're starting with small chunks. But yeah, I'd be more comfortable getting that meat browned or boiled or whatever beforehand. I always pre-cook meat (before Shabbat) that's going to go into the crock pot, because I want the wiggle room if the timer is slow. (Morning routine is to put the pot into the heating unit and leave for shul; sometime later the timer turns it on. If things are timed well, it turns it on about 10 minutes later, but mechanical timers aren't all that reliable.)
(Ok, there's also a halachic issue with the crock pot; making a stew or something that hasn't been pre-cooked at all would definitely be "cooking", which is forbidden on Shabbat. Warming up cooked food is different, but as
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Sure, but given that you need it to be substantially cooked before Shabbat starts (assuming the beef+liquid example we started with) you want that headstart.
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I start Shabbat with post-raw meat because I'm paranoid. And because I probably don't understand all of the halachic issues of trying to do otherwise. So it might not be as done as I would find palatable (that being what the next N hours are for), but it will at least be cooked to a safe level.
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Well, often, yes. But you can make cholent with a large slab of meat. And it doesn't have to be beef. And, for that matter, I know lots of people who make vegetarian cholent. There are hundreds of kinds of cholents. You've got your basic meat and potato cholent, your lentil based cholent, potato based, bean based, etc.
Personally, I think cholent is icky, so I avoid it. But that's just me. Seth likes it, but if he wants it in our house, he's gotta make it for himself. (Actually, to be fair, I made it twice. It's just that I didn't like it)
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The reason, as I understand it (but I don't have my notes in front of me as I'm at work right now), is that if you have raw meat in the crock pot (or regular pot, I suppose), you're not going to be opening and closing the crock pot to see if it's cooked yet, because you'll know that it isn't. If you open and close the pot, there are issues with letting the steam out, and then closing it back up again. There are probably other reasons, too, but I never internalized them because I don't make cholent.
Re: reheating chicken removed from its juices, I'll have to check, but I would think that's a problem, because reheating meat would have issues with "melting the fat" or something. The problem, of course, is that "dry to the touch" can be interpreted a few different ways. My understanding is that the most commonly accepted way is to touch the food and then touch your fingers to the napkin. If there are traces of liquid on the napkin, then it is not dry to the touch. That said, most people in my community use a more liberal interpretation than that.