weekend stuff

[cellio]

This Shabbat was the first of four in a row where we have no bar or bat mitzvah. This means our rabbi gets to stay for the entire informal morning service -- yay! It's nice that we have lay people who can conduct the service and read torah, but this really is his minyan in many ways, and I feel bad when scheduling makes him miss some of it.

Torah readers are assigned through mid-March. This is the farthest ahead we've been scheduled for a while! I don't know when I'll next read there; I'm probably reading for a women's service in February, but that's a different group. (They asked for volunteers to read torah or lead parts of the service; I said I could do either but have Opinions about content of the latter that I'd like to discuss before committing. So it looks like I get torah reading, which is fine.)

Something I wonder about in this week's portion: after Yosef interprets Paro's dreams, Paro elevates him to second-in-command of all Egypt. One of the things he gives Yosef is the "chariot of the second in command". This makes it sound like the position already exists, which leads me to wonder what happened to the previous holder of that job. Did he misinterpret Paro's dreams?

As long as I'm doing minutiae... during Chanukah and on Purim there's an insertion into the Amidah (central prayer). In the Shabbat service, the siddur includes the Chanukah one but not the Purim one. (The Purim one is included for weekdays, though, so it's not a general oversight.) I wonder if that means that Purim can never fall on Shabbat. (Chanukah, being eight days, is guaranteed to hit at least one Shabbat. I wonder if it can hit two, or if it never starts on Shabbat either.)

Saturday night was my company's holiday party. It was huge! We've been growing a lot, but when people are spread out it's not as obvious. Put us all in one room with significant others and... wow. We missed the party last year, and this was much bigger than two years ago.

The party was fun; the organizers did a good job with it. This year, unlike last year (I'm told), we did not run out of food. Dani found a wine that was sweet enough for him (a Riesling, but I failed to get specifics). Some people brought instruments and were jamming in the front room; I didn't bring any on the theory that it would be Christmas music, but it turns out that would have been ok (they were improvising, mostly). On the other hand, for expedience I would have brought drums, not the hammer dulcimer -- and one of my coworkers is really good on drums, so there wouldn't have been much I could contribute. But I enjoyed listening, so that was fine.

Today the washer and dryer rebelled. (What did we ever do to them?) The washer has decided that it doesn't like the rinse cycle, so it just stops there. We can drain the water and reset it to get it to fill and agitate again, hacking a rinse, but it won't spin. Bah. And then the dryer decided that heat was optional, though once we took the front panel off to look for a fuse (unsuccessfully) and took the vent stack apart looking for a lint clog (nope), it began to give us lackluster heat. I guess we just needed to speak sternly to it -- for now.

The appliances came with the house (five years ago) and weren't new then. I wonder what the usual life-expectancy is on these things. I guess we should find out what a service call costs, and whether he'll give us a break for two appliances in one visit.

So, hours after I expected to be done, my shirts are slowly drying, jeans are queued up behind them, and Dani has a load queued up behind that. Whee.

Comments

purim & shabbat

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

As long as I'm doing minutiae... during Chanukah and on Purim there's an insertion into the Amidah (central prayer). In the Shabbat service, the siddur includes the Chanukah one but not the Purim one. (The Purim one is included for weekdays, though, so it's not a general oversight.) I wonder if that means that Purim can never fall on Shabbat.

Basically, "yup". Except for in cities that were walled way-back-when (i.e. Yerushalayim, Shushan, and maybe a few others, but I don't know of any offhand) where Purim is celebrated a day later than everyone else ("Shushan Purim"), Purim can't fall on Shabbat now that we're using a predictive calendar rather than waiting for witnesses to arrive at the main court so they can declare the new month. The advantage of this is that no one (outside of the walled cities) has to worry about about carrying a megliah on Shabbat to shul (or elsewhere) for reading (and inside walled cities carrying on Shabbat isn't a problem).

Other holidays that get scheduled with respect to Shabbat are Yom Kippur, which cannot be the day before or the day after but may be on Shabbat (iirc, the main reason is that the rabbis of the time felt that fasting right before or after feasting on Shabbat would not be healthy, plus if Yom Kippur was the day before Shabbat it would be hard to prepare for Shabbat), and Hoshana Rabbah (the last day of Chol Hamoed of Sukkot - iirc, the reason here was that the extra ceremony of the day involves Aravot and the rabbis didn't want people to be tempted to carry them on Shabbat).

(Chanukah, being eight days, is guaranteed to hit at least one Shabbat. I wonder if it can hit two, or if it never starts on Shabbat either.)

Chanukah can start & end on Shabbat - a quick check in my 200-year calendar book shows 2002, 2003, and 2006 as examples.

[geekosaur]

One of the things he gives Yosef is the "chariot of the second in command". This makes it sound like the position already exists, which leads me to wonder what happened to the previous holder of that job. Did he misinterpret Paro's dreams?

The Plaut commentary about this seems to suggest (reading between the lines) that that position existed to be given, but wasn't always filled.

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

Dani found a wine that was sweet enough for him (a Riesling, but I failed to get specifics).

Can't help you with vintners, of course, seeing as I wasn't there... but as I recall, there is a generic dryness scale for Rieslings; starts with plain Riesling on the dryish end, then comes Kabinett, Spätlese, Auslese, Beerauslese, and the syrupiest of them all, Trockenbeerauslese.

Sounds like Dani and montuos should share a bottle...

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

Ah, Rieslings ... Walt and I are quite fond of the semi-dry variety. I think they're usually described as "first pressing" or somesuch. The sweet versions are kind of icky and not worth the effort, IMHO. Carmel and Hagafen have good Rieslings.

[goljerp]

One of the things he gives Yosef is the "chariot of the second in command".

While I'm thinking about translations, it's interesting to note that the translation the Hertz uses (which I think is the "old" JPS?) translates that as P's second-best chariot, which is my excuse for not having thought of that.

As an aside, I wonder if Joy picked up on all my hints about the new Alter translation (The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary ISBN 0393019551) :-)