Shabbat

[cellio]

I'm glad I went to my own congregation Friday rather than taking the cantorial opportunity. Our associate rabbi gave a really good sermon. I'm used to really good sermons from the senior rabbi; he's been at this for 20+ years. The associate rabbi doesn't have as much practice. He also, of course, lives in the shadow of the senior rabbi.

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?

Comments

[estherchaya.livejournal.com]

Cholent is, fundamentally, beef stew, so at least you're starting with small chunks.

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)