(no subject)

Our first-season West Wing DVDs have arrived from England or Australia or wherever we ordered them from. I have hopes that the player that can read them will be along shortly.

Woo hoo. I just noticed that Schoolhouse Rock has been compiled on DVD! Gotta get that. The release date was just a couple days ago, and I bumped into it by chance. I've been loosely compiling an Amazon order for a while and they're currently doing free shipping, so this seems a good time to run up the credit card.

For those who care: my "last few days" entry on Tuesday has spawned a small discussion on how some Jews go about deciding what music from Christiandom is ok to sing. (The specific context is choral music.)

Remember my high-school friend Lori and her husband, Daniel-the-annoying-evangelist? They have email now. I'm not sure they and the net are ready for each other; they had very few computer instincts when last we discussed the subject. They're also pregnant, and they want to get together with us real soon to catch up, and there'll be a baby shower in a few weeks, and... I'm not sure I'm ready for elevated levels of contact with them. I think the once-a-year model worked pretty well, actually.

long time no "see", and the shofar on Shabbat

Neat. I've bumped into Micha again.

Micha was a regular on the Usenet group soc.culture.jewish[.moderated]. For all I know he still is; my feed for this group is highly flaky and I don't read it any more. We got into some interesting discussions back then (we're talking four year ago now), and this resulted in my flying out to spend a Shabbat with his (Orthodox) family. It was a fascinating experience in many ways. (I wrote a huge journal entry about it. I wrote lots of huge entries back then...)

But then my feed got flaky, and Usenet continued to descend to new depths, and we lost touch. Recently some of the "old regulars" started a mailing list for discussions among members of different movements, and when I heard about it I signed up. I noticed that Micha was there but didn't make direct contact.

After I posted something last week he sent me mail saying, basically, "long time no see". So we've been catching up. Nifty. I wasn't really even sure he would even remember me. I get the impression that he does a lot of what I call "Orthodox outreach", and I figured I was just another person passing through to him. (For all that we exchanged long, deep email for a while.)

So now we're arguing (on the list) about the ban on blowing the shofar if Rosh Hashana falls on Shabbat. Ah, it feels good to be home. :-)

(The issue is that we are commanded to hear the shofar on Rosh Hashana, except the rabbis ruled that if RH is on Shabbat we don't do this. Why? Because of the prohibition on carrying things in the public domain on Shabbat -- if we blow shofar on Shabbat, then someone might be tempted to carry one and that would be bad, and even having one that lives at the synagogue is not adequate. My counter-argument: if it's about carrying, then why do we permit the use of any object during Shabbat services? We read from a Torah scroll, make kiddush with a kiddush cup, use siddurim (prayer books), etc, and someone could be tempted to carry these items from outside the building. Yet it is sufficient to set items aside that belong to the synagogue and live there, so why not also the shofar?)