weekend

Friday night: Shabbat services, and then to Ralph and Lori's party. It looks like we missed the neighbors and whatever relatives were there, but the friends and former coworkers were mostly still there. It was good to see the gang again, even if I did see many of them only last week at Larry's birthday party. Didn't get to talk to everyone as much as I'd like, but oh well. Deanna's hair lights were spiffy.

Saturday evening after havdalah and dinner at Zeb's (salmon in the salmon salad was a bit overcooked, the tomato bisque was excellent, and Dani spoke highly of the sausage lasagne), I headed over to Aya's Chanukah party. It was lots of fun, though not quite as musical as in past years. Rabbi Gibson and his family had to leave early (I think he flew to NY for our rabbi emeritus' funeral today), and Tom and Carol also left fairly early, which knocked out all our guitar players except for Bob, who was feeling self-conscious. (I don't know whether he's a beginner or out of practice.) Saw Norbert, a co-worker from Claritech who left during the layoffs. I think David wanted him but he quit to go work for Schwoo, which after the last few rounds of layoffs is down to about 15 people. Norbert is back at Claritech.

Saturday night: got mail from my shell provider saying they're going to move the main domain name (and thus web stuff). Email should be unaffected. Logged onto the new machine to explore and contemplate moving my mail so everything will be in one place, but reached no real conclusions. Same pine version, at least. Different flavor of Unix (openBSD instead of Solaris, IIRC). I'll defer the decision.

Sunday: boring chores (laundry and bill-paying). Another potluck dinner (local SCA household) that was fun. Steve brought smoked salmon; yum. Someone else brought really wonderful cheesecake. I took one look at the dessert table and decided I was *not* eating the meat. :-) Got home a bit too late to then head over to Ralph and Lori's for the remnants of Sunday dinner. Not that we would have eaten anyway (where would we put it?), but hanging out with folks is always fun.

more from Thursday's meeting

I'm going to try to gather up some of the other loose ends from my conversation with my rabbi, though I wasn't taking (many) notes and it's now been a few days, so this'll be vague in places.

He recommended that I become familiar with the works of Leopold Zunz, a 19th-century scholar, though I failed to note why. (Presumably related to the whole question of reforms/innovations in halacha, as that was the main topic of conversation.) One of these days I'll get myself a copy of Encyclopedia Judaica so I can look up the bare-bones info on pointers like this.

We talked about how reforms to halacha go all the way back. He believes that the Reform movement follows the process, though because its interpretations are different, when you build on those things can seem to get kind of far afield. An example from me (that we didn't discuss): if you have made a case for egalitarian reforms in most things, as Reform and some Conservative have done, then I have to grant that you can make a case for patrilineal descent. (I still think this is a bad idea, however, as it really divides the Jewish people on the question of who is a Jew, and it's not like children of Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers can't convert fairly trivially if they're raised in the religion.) We didn't go very far down this path; I think I disagree with his claim, because at least historically there have been cases where Reform just plain threw out halacha, but maybe he's talking current practice and not history.

Remember, though, that Reform does not believe that the oral law (or, necessarily, the written law, i.e. Torah) came directly from God at Sinai, so this is presumably more about respecting the tradition than anything else. It seems obvious to me that my rabbi respects the halachic tradition far more than average in Reform (probably a lot of why we click so well), but one rabbi does not a movement make.

We drifted into the question of just how a modern Reform Jew goes about making decisions, and we kept ending up on Shabbat topics. We talked about electricity; I said I use timers for lights and the crock pot and am fairly rigid there and more lenient elsewhere (though I try to avoid issues rather than making explicit decisions; I'm a wuss). He asked detailed questions about the crock pot; not sure why. Somewhere in there I said that I don't unscrew the fridge light, though as a practical matter I know where in the fridge the things I'm going to need on Shabbat are, and occasionally (read: at night when the room is otherwise dark) I've been known to close my eyes and just grab the Coke anyway. He thought this was excessive, and this led to a discussion of intent vs. side-effect. He's right; I already believe that side-effects are not transgressions if I didn't want the results anyway. (We also talked about motion-sensor lights in this context. Summary: the (now-hypothetical) neighbor's lights are not my problem. Putting one in myself would be.)

We talked some about the get issue, and the Orthodox solution of editing history and how offensive I found that idea. I've mentioned this before.

We didn't really talk about what I describe as "rules hacks" in the halachic system. Another time. (I still have stuff I want to say about this, but haven't gotten it written down yet.)

At the end of the hour he asked whether I wanted to keep studying philosophy or instead begin to tackle talmud, and I opted for the latter. During the Shabbat discussion we had already started into that, so we're going to just start with the 39 melachot (forbidden categories of work) and go from there. Just as soon as the book I ordered comes in and I make a first pass through the first bit on my own to acclimate. Yay! I can't wait!