Simchat Torah, Shabbat

( Simchat Torah: rejoicing with the torah )

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.

LJ PSAs

Random LJ errata:

Several of my friends are being bitten by an apparent bug in posting by email that overwrites your most recent entry instead of making a new one. I haven't posted by email in a while, and given that am not motivated to experiment, but if you do, beware.

Sometimes the time stamps in new posts are in Pacific time rather than local time; sometimes they aren't. Maybe it depends which server you hit or something. There are lots of bug reports about this.

After a bug that screwed up some existing memories (and yeah, like I'm thrilled about having to re-add 400+ memories to recover from the bug...), there are now some other screwy problems with memories. Oh, and if you edit a memory it shows up at the end of your list, so the "sort by order added" view is really "sort by order last edited", which is less useful. When I'm not being bitten by screwy behavior, I'm just editing all of mine to start with the date of the entry, which is close enough to "order added" over the long term. Then I can sort by description and not have to care about wacky ordering.