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Simchat Torah, Shabbat
(Aside for my non-Jewish readers: a hakafah (plural: hakafot) is a procession carrying the sefer torah, or torah scroll. On Simchat Torah we take out all the sifrei torah and do seven hakafot; the theory is that people might even dance rather than just walking. It's a festive time, and everyone who wants to is supposed to get the opportunity to carry a sefer torah. For many people, this is the only time they'll get that close to one.)
I'm not sure what the norm is for the hakafot. At my "backup" synagogue they just invite people to come up and make sure everyone gets a turn during one of the seven times around. At my synagogue, they call people up by group, where "group" means something like "grandparents" or "people who've been members here for more than 20 years" or "native Pittsburghers", with the final one being a catch-all for anyone who didn't get to go.
You see the problem, I'm sure. The groups are non-exclusive, and people who don't match any of the stated descriptions feel like also-rans. This is, in fact, why I stopped going to my synagogue for Simchat Torah for a few years; I was sick of the family-centric divisons in place at the time that did not account for singles and people without kids. They've gotten better about that, at least (it's not all about families), but it's still awfully family-centric. This time, the first three were "grandparents", "parents", and "women", and one single man standing near me was visibly disappointed to see some people on their third go-round before he'd had one. (That's a separate issue: some of our people don't seem to have the clue that once they've had a chance they should sit out until others have had one.) So for next year, I'm going to suggest to my rabbi that the first two be mutually-exclusive groups -- it really doesn't matter what they are -- and then they can go from there.
Turnout for the morning service was much smaller, but the service was still fun and the lower turnout ensured that everyone got one or two hakafot. The rabbis and cantorial soloist seemed to be having fun, which is good -- sometimes when you're busy running something you don't get to actually enjoy it. Seeing our associate rabbi dancing down the aisle while holding a (lightweight) torah scroll vertically above his head clued me in that he was having a good time. :-)
On the way home I ran into a couple people I know who were just walking out of New Light, a Conservative synagogue a block from my home. That congregation does two days of yom tov, so they had had Sh'mini Atzeret but not Simchat Torah (yet). I had a mostly-interesting, sometimes-frustrating conversation with them. (The frustration came from the fact that one of them was asking me questions about Reform, the other acknowledged that I "know a lot" and am "a scholar", but said other person wouldn't stop interrupting me when I tried to answer the first one's questions. Oh well.)
Thursday evening was our regular weekday minyan (it doesn't meet every day). Turnout has been very low lately, and often it's just me and the rabbi. This week there were two other people there. The rabbi asked us for input on this service -- should we keep doing it as-is, be more aggressive in getting people to come, or give up? I think we're going to try more gentle promotion and give it another year to see what happens, but this will probably be on the agenda of the next worship meeting.
Friday night a (curious gentile) friend went with me to services. I felt bad that, while much of the congregational Hebrew is transliterated, most of it is sung -- so she was facing not just linguistic barriers but also melodic ones. She seemed to be making a valiant effort, though, and she told me later that she found it fulfilling, so I'm glad I was able to help. I suggested that she try our morning service sometime too.
This week was B'reishit, the first portion of the torah. We are now reading the third aliya (of the traditional seven), so we got the part about the incident in the garden. My rabbi made a very good point in his sermon: this is not a story about good and evil, but about knowledge and mortality. So long as Adam and Chava were ignorant, they could live forever in the garden -- but if they were to eat from both the tree of life and the tree of knowledge, they would become like God -- immortal and all-knowing. So when they chose knowledge they had to give up immortality. Would any of us make a different choice? I know I wouldn't.
I guess this is why I don't really connect with the idea of original sin. Eating from the tree of knowledge was a necessary transition in human history, just as going into slavery in Egypt was a necessary transition for the Jewish people. It's not good or bad; it just is. Yes, they disobeyed a direct order from God, but the fact that they had that choice is significant. They were designed to be thinking beings, not automata, from the start -- and to think meaningfully, you need knowledge. (I should stress that this paragraph is purely me talking, and I don't know if my rabbi would agree with what I'm saying.)
This morning's service went well, except for the part where I misread the notation in the chumash and wound the scroll to the wrong spot. Not only that, but the portion begins in the middle of a long paragraph, so the beginning is hard to find. So we spent several minutes during the service trying to find the right spot. Oops. That's embarrassing.
Next week after morning services I'm going to give a short class on leading the torah service. This will allow more people, including those who don't actually want to read torah, to participate in the service. I have a good handout that I got this summer in the Sh'liach K'hilah program, so rather than roll my own I'm going to use that (with permission). It's an annotated copy of the service and includes transliteration for all the Hebrew, so people will be able to take that home and practice.
Last night we got some bad news. The sister of one of our
teachers, and sister-in-law of our bar-mitzvah tutor
(who reads torah at Tree of Life on weekdays, so I see him
a lot), was killed in one of the bombings in Egypt. She was
27. Baruch dayan emet, and if I believed in hell I'd pray
for all the bastards who attack innocent civilians to rot in it.
no subject
Eating from the tree of knowledge was a necessary transition in human history, just as going into slavery in Egypt was a necessary transition for the Jewish people.
Something being necessary doesn't make it not evil. As for Joseph's brothers selling him into slavery, there is no way that they could have known that it would be necessary in order to save them from the famine or to set up the Hebrews to receive the Torah. They only knew that their brother had favor with their father, was acting arrogant, and wanted him out of the way. They were not performing an unpleasant but necessary task, they were trying to murder him for selfish reasons, and would have done so directly except for Reuben. I'm finding it rather hard to call premeditated kidnapping a good, or even a neutral act.
The analogy to The Apple is similar--they didn't know that it was necessary, only that it was evil.
no subject
Can someone who hasn't eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil perform an evil act? Or does evil require intention?
I don't think Adam and Chava were capable of evil at the time.
no subject
The way I understand it -- and I'm pretty sure this is in the midrash -- is that they were capable of evil (read: disobedience to G-d's instructions), but it was for them an intellectual thing, not tied up with irrational physical urges. Kind of like how -- well, imagine you're a person who has non-functional taste buds and no physical reaction to chocolate or other sweet fattening things (blood sugar fluctuations and other chemical changes). For you, the question of whether to gorge yourself repeatedly on this kind of food and risk heartburn/bloating/weight gain/clogged arteries/general bad health is kinda abstract and theoretical. I mean, you *could*, but since it has no sensual appeal, why bother? Before eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, consideration of whether to do bad was kind of the same way for Adam and Eve -- still within the realm of possibility but nevertheless abstract and theoretical, because it was *outside* of them. Eating the fruit bound the possibility of doing bad into their physical natures -- it put them in a position where their physical desires, not their intellectual musings, led them to consider the possibility of disobedience. I believe the midrash indicates that once Chava was taken in by the serpent and ate, one of Adam's considerations for also eating was that he believed it would be more of a tribute to G-d if he obeyed G-d's commands in spite of having strong physical desires that would lead him in other directions. The problem was that Adam overestimated himself somewhat and didn't consider that the physical desires would be strong enough that there was no guarantee that he could always hold out against them ... that's what I remember off the top of my head for now.
no subject
But instead of thinking of orignal sin as being a sin that tainted the rest of us, I think of it as "the origin of sin"; that transition in which humanity grew into being a moral species, after which sin existed because it was possible for us to know better. So you and I agree on that historical-transition perspective even if we use different phrasing.
As for the rest, well I've long maintained that "in His image" refers to our having free will, so it looks like we agree on the importance of intelligence and free will.