(no subject)

We've got gremlins.

Remember, a few weeks ago, when I wrote that my reading lamp had "exploded" without warning on Shabbat? Hold that thought.

Our house is very nice, but it does have the occasional "what were they thinking?" feature. One such is the lamp built into the newel post at the bottom of the steps (on the main floor). Someone actually drilled a hole through the post in order to run a wire to a lamp that was (theoretically) screwed onto the top of said post. (The screws were long gone by the time we bought the house.) I've never been able to find the other end of this wire, by the way; the basement is confusing.

The lamp is kind of goofy and a little ugly, but we can't replace it without splicing (or tracing) that wire. And if we just plain remove it, we have a visible hole in the post. So we've pretty much ignored it, because that's the path of least resistance. But it is a convenient light to leave on for Shabbat (it uses a night-light bulb, 4 watts I think), which is the only time we turn it on.

Last night, a second or two after I turned it on, it caught fire and (I presume) shorted out. It was a small fire (flames were probably under a foot) and it burned itself out before I got to the fire extinguisher. But this lamp had never done anything particularly weird before. I have no idea what caused this.

What the heck has gotten into our wiring?

I want an electrician to come in and look things over, though I don't really know what he could do besides look at the breaker box and say "yup, you have wires, connected ones even".

The Mishkan came from IKEA

Ok, maybe not. But it would explain some things.

Wednesday I met with my rabbi again to study talmud. We've been working our way through the 39 categories of forbidden work on Shabbat. A unifying principle is that everything on this list is a kind of work that was done to build the Mishkan (the portable sanctuary that travelled in the desert). That's important, actually; the reason these types of work are forbidden is that right after we get the instructions for building the Mishkan God says "keep the Sabbath". So the rabbis interpreted that as meaning "don't build the Mishkan on Shabbat".

(There are a few explicit directives, like not kindling fire, but most are derived from Mishkan-building.)

Ok, so one of the categories is writing (and its inverse, erasing in order to write). Specifically, it is forbidden to write two letters together; a lone letter is fine. Why?

Because the various poles and things that held up the walls in the Mishkan were labelled. And we thought "insert tab A into slot B" was a modern construct. Who'd've thought?

I guess IKEA is the wrong model, though. IKEA never gives you anything as straightforward as text. "Insert the thing that looks kind of like this doohicky into the hole that isn't quite in the right place but is your best guess" would be more the IKEA style.

Shabbat

It was good to have a "real" Shabbat this week, after dealing with Pennsic issues last week.

There was a bat mitzvah Friday night. If I had known about this (or, more properly, remembered -- I'd seen an announcement before Pennsic and forgotten), I wouldn't have gone after the experience of that annoying Friday-night bar mitzvah a couple months back. But by the time I discovered this it was too late to go somewhere else (and be on time), so oh well.

This one went much better. It did not intrude to the extent that the previous one did; it was still recognizable as our congregation's Shabbat service, instead of being a show revolving around the kid. (I still hope we don't see this sort of thing often, though. These should really be done Saturday morning.)

At the oneg the rabbi told me something to the effect of "that worked much better than last time, eh?". I hadn't complained about the previous one, but I guess he knows me well enough by now to have predicted that. :-) He also told me there are some changes that he's going to insist on from now on, like keeping it down to three aliyot instead of seven. If the family wants seven, they can do it on Saturday morning like they're supposed to anyway. And he's leaning on families hard to keep the thank-yous and the "parental greeting" short. (This was the main source of the annoyance last time.)

I think I actually got this information, unsolicited, because I'm (nominally) co-chair of the worship committee. Gee, that turned out to be handy for something!

The girl's sermon was actually pretty well done (albeit short). This week's portion includes what's called the "tochecha", the long section of dire curses that will befall Israel if they don't keep God's commandments. (Deut. 29, for the curious.) So she talked about what motivates people under different circumstances and pointed out that there are actually three motivators, not the two that immediately come to mind: reward, punishment, and obligation. By the last, she means doing something because it's the right thing to do and not because of rewards (or punishments) that will come. Not a new thought to most adults, I suspect, but it was nice to hear this coming from a 13-year-old.

The morning Torah-study group has just reached the discussion of kashrut in Leviticus, so Rabbi Freedman brought some thoughts from a (modern) source that I didn't note on the question of "why these food laws?". A lot of people think kashrut is about health, but that's not really it. This source offered the theory that we are forbidden to eat animals that have characeristics we would not want to emulate -- e.g. we don't eat carnivores because people should not kill aggressively, we don't eat lions because they're seen as proud, we don't eat scavengers, etc. ("You are what you eat" taken to new levels?) This sounds weak to me for two reasons: (1) there are forbidden animals without obvious "problematic" characteristics, and (2) if that were the reason, it wouldn't just be about food -- we'd be forbidden to benefit from those animals in any way, or so I suspect.

While the answer "because God said so" is usually unpopular in liberal Judaism, sometimes I think it's the correct answer. There will always be some commandments for which we can't discern a reason, after all. (There's even a name for them -- chukim.)

telemarketers

Usually I just tell junk callers to go away (and put us on their no-call lists). We've been getting a lot of calls offering to refinance our mortgage lately, though, and I've found that the fastest way to get rid of them is to ask "can you beat 6 percent?". The folklore says that the telemarketers aren't allowed to hang up on you, but I've got a pile of experience to the contrary. :-)