Entries tagged with pesach

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Pesach services

We were in Toronto for the first days of Pesach. I had previously had an excellent experience at Beit HaMinyan (not just the one, but that's the one I wrote about), so I was looking forward to going there for Shabbat/Pesach morning. I checked their web site before leaving Pittsburgh to make sure they were in the same place; thus reassured, I went there Saturday morning to...an empty, locked building. They're very friendly and welcoming when they're there, but maybe not so great at updating their web site. Bummer. :-(

So I fell back to the Village Shul (Aish HaTorah), a place I'd been once before. This time, as last, I found them to be not too welcoming; this time I knew where to go in the building so the indifferent man standing at the entrance didn't hinder me, but nor did he respond to my greeting. At the kiddush (which was a standing-around affair this time, not a sit-down one), not a single person greeted me, even when I made eye contact. It can be hard for me to approach random people and start conversations; I greeted some and usually got responses but no one engaged. I don't know what (if anything) I was doing wrong; I think it was fairly obvious that I wasn't a regular, but I wasn't inappropriate in any way I could determine.

But all that said, I'm very glad I went for one reason: Tal.

Ok, I need to back up. T'filat Tal, aka the prayer for dew, is said exactly once during the year, on the morning of Pesach, in the musaf service. I had never heard it before. The Reform movement doesn't do musaf and didn't import that part into another part of the service (like is done with some other parts), and when we're in Toronto I don't always make it to Yom Tov services (but I insist on Shabbat). It's possible that I was at a Conservative service for Pesach once, and if so either they didn't do it or they didn't do anything special with it and I didn't notice.

So, this is either the first time I've encountered this prayer or the first time it registered. And it did in fact register. A resonant text (which I am unable to find online, help?), a beautiful and fitting melody (which I can't find a good version of online), and just the right amount of congregational engagement (a few words sung together at the end of each stanza) all came together into a heartfelt but not over-the-top prayer that felt entirely right to me. Wow.

And I think it needs all of those. As I said, the Reform movement doesn't do this text -- but let me predict how it would go down if we did. Because it's unfamiliar and people can't be assumed to be fluent, we would read (not sing) it, in English. Perhaps responsively, alternating stanzas. And it would fall completely flat, done that way. I'm not fluent and I'd never seen this text before either, but I listened to it in Hebrew while reading the English translation, and that worked. If I didn't need the translation then that'd be even better, but the text I read and the text I hear don't need to be the same language and that's just fine. Alas, mine seems to be a small-minority position in my movement, so I will probably not get the opportunity to experience this prayer in that setting, which makes me sad.

( some service anthropology )

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Pesach

We were in Toronto for a few days. We spent some time with Dani's family, helped an outlaw (spouse of an inlaw) buy a computer, saw a show I might review later (Billy Elliot), visited a textile museum, and went to the two seders. This post is mostly about the seders.

But first: on the way up it rained the whole way, except that it was sunny in Erie. That's just Wrong. Bad weather is centered in Erie; it's one of the laws of the universe. :-)

( seders )

We experienced good hospitality on this trip. My sister-in-law and her husband have always been happy to have us, and this year I found that they had laid in a supply of Diet Coke in anticipation. :-) ("Um, we couldn't remember if you take it with caffeine..." "Caffeine is the point of the exercise." "Oh good, we got it right.") My mother-in-law went to the effort to procure kosher meat for me (no one else cares), which was a nice surprise. The hosts of the first seder, about whom I didn't have clear memories from their previous turn, were gracious and easy-going even with 20+ people invading their home. :-)

We saw something interesting in their home, by the way. They had recently returned from travel overseas (I didn't catch where) and had brought back a painting. It was a reasonable journeyman-grade picture of a vase of flowers -- unremarkable, until you learn that it was painted by an elephant. :-) They told us that they had a painting done by an elephant and I was imagining abstract art, but no -- somebody has trained some elephants to do specific classes of paintings. (Different elephants did different ones, as I understand it.) They watched their painting being painted. (A human has to dip the brush in the paint and put it in the elephant's trunk.) "Their" elephant is four years old, which led to the expected comments about child labor.

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Pennsic in bullet points

(I'm home now and won't be catching up on a week and a half's worth of LJ. If there's something I should see, please tell me.)
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short takes (link round-up, mostly)

Pesach has been going well. Tonight/tomorrow is the last day, which is a holiday like the first day was. Yesterday Rabbi Symons led a beit midrash on the "pour out your wrath" part of the haggadah; more about that later, but it led me to a new-to-me haggadah that so far I'm liking a lot. (I borrowed a copy after the beit midrash.) When I lead my own seder (two years from mow, I'm guessing?) the odds are good that it will be with this one.

Tangentially-related: a short discussion of overly-pediatric seders.

Same season, different religion: researchers have found that portion sizes in depictions of the last supper have been rising for a millennium, though I note the absence of an art historian on the research team.

Same season, no religion: I won't repeat most of the links that were circulating on April 1, but I haven't seen these new Java annotations around much. Probably only amusing to programmers, but very amusing to this one.

Not an April-fool's prank: xiphias is planning a response to the Tea Party rally on Boston Common on April 14: he's holding a tea party. You know, with fine china and actual tea and people wearing their Sunday (well, Wednesday) best. It sounds like fun.

Edit (almost forgot!): things I learned from British folk songs.

From nancylebov: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality looks like it'll be a good read. Or, as siderea put it, Richard Feynman goes to Hogwarts.

Real Live Preacher's account of a Quaker meeting.

Thanks to jducoeur for a pointer to this meta community over on Dreamwidth.

I remember reading a blog post somewhere about someone who rigged up a camera to find out what his cat did all day. Now someone is selling that. Tempting!

In case you're being too productive, let me help with this cute flash game (link from Dani).

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Pesach

Friends from my congregation invited me to their chavurah's seder Monday night. There were about 50 people there (largest group they've ever had). I hadn't known in advance that my friend would be leading it, so that was a nice touch. It was a warm, friendly seder, complete enough to be satisfying and expedient enough that the kids present weren't getting too antsy. There wasn't as much singing as I'd expected, but what there was was enthusiastic. It was a good experience.

New insight (reported by my friend, attributed to Rabbi Symons): we can view the four sons as the filling-out of a matrix (ok, he didn't say matrix) of wisdom and piety. The quiet son has neither. The simple one has piety but not wisdom. The rasha (evil son) has wisdom and no piety (he uses his wisdom to rebel). The wise son has both. The rabbis tend to do this sort of 2x2 mapping of attributes to types of Jews, so this is in that spirit.

For the first time (or maybe second?) our congregation offered to match people looking for seders with people who could take guests. (Before that everyone asked the rabbi, I think.) Matching for the first night was very successful. I requested a seder for the second night but it didn't happen -- but I didn't know that early enough to do something about it. So sigh. A second seder isn't necessary for me, but it's nice to do if I can, particularly if it's different in some way from the first. Someone asked on a mailing list tonight why Reform Jews would have second-night seders; what I wrote was: the first seder is to fulfill external obligations -- to God, to family, to those who can't/won't handle some of the content, etc.; the second seder is to fulfill internal obligations -- study, spiritual growth, etc. So next time I'm at home for Pesach I plan to hold my own second-night seder; it sounds like enough of my friends don't go to one regularly that they'd possibly be available to come to mine. (Whether they'd want to come is an open question, but it can't be answered now anyway so why worry?) I think next year we're going to Toronto, though, so probably not for two years.

Morning services on Tuesday went well. The crowd was smaller than it will be next week (seventh day) for Yizkor. Usually my rabbi asks me to read part of the holiday megillah (Song of Songs, for Pesach); I'm lousy at reading poetry, particularly translated poetry, so I'm glad he asked others to do so instead. (I'm always happy to read from Ruth or Kohelet.) Instead he gave me an aliya, which was nice -- I so rarely get to hear my Hebrew name used!

Foodies: my favorite brisket is made in a pan on the stove in tomato sauce and spices. (Simmer two hours, slice thinly against grain, simmer two more hours.) I don't have a suitable kosher-for-Pesach pan. Google suggests that I can cook a brisket in sauce in the oven to good effect; I would welcome specific suggestions that work well for you. The oven-cooked briskets I've had have been closer to the "roast + gravy" model than the "barbecue beef" model -- also good, but not the effect I'm looking for this time.

Omer: day 2. Haven't forgotten yet. :-)

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strange Pesach conversations

(Gentile) coworker: When we realized that the pot-luck dinner was during Pesach, we decided to try our best to accommodate the Jewish attendees. So we kashered the oven, boiled the utensils, used a foil pan, etc... but I didn't kasher the drill bit.

Drill bit?

Spade bit, he said -- for coring the pears.

Some of you guys probably sigh when software geeks like me go off on something. What makes software geeks sigh? Hardware geeks. :-)

(Ok, ok -- it's clever, and he says you can do a dozen pears or apples in under a minute so it's efficient for large-scale prep. I suppose if I happened to have a drill lying around in my kitchen...)

Another coworker caught the last part of this and asked if wood is kosher. (That being the only substance the bit had been in contact with.) I said it's a plant, so I guess so.

(Yes, I know -- none of this addresses whether the drill bit -- or anything else in this story -- has been to a mikveh.)

* * *

Someone: Is there a market for kosher-for-Pesach pet food?

Me: Surely. But I handle the problem a different way. The food belongs to the cats, who are not Jewish.

Someone: You sold the food to the cats?

Me: No, they aren't valid buyers. I gave it to them.

* * *

Me to guest for Wednesday lunch: Any food allergies?

Guest: I can't eat gluten -- bread, noodles, oats...

Me: So this is pretty much the perfect time for me to invite you?

(I didn't ask what she does about the matzah that must be eaten at the seder.)

Entry tags:

pesach

Pesach (so far)

lefkowitzga and her family invited me to their seder Wednesday night. I'm really glad; it was a wonderful experience. We did most of the haggadah, we sang, we had stimulating conversation, there was excellent food... what more could one ask?

Gail, her parents, one other participant, and I had a meeting in advance to go over the haggadah, decide what would be sung and to which melodies, assign some roles, and so on. They were very open to doing parts I suggested that they don't normally do, and I think people enjoyed it. (It's important to me, but I certainly don't want to be a burden at someone else's seder.) So we did more of Hallel than usual, and we sang some other parts that usually just get read, and it was fun. We used the generically-named "Haggadah for Pesach" published by the CCAR in the 80s; I gather it's now been superseded, but this one worked well for us. And it has the benefit of having sheet music in the back, though not always the sheet music as we know it. :-) (They can't win: they can do the kindness of providing the assistance, but any printed version cannot account for the folk process.)

We had 16 adults and one child too young to ask the four questions. The teenager present didn't want to sing them, so we sang them as a group and he read the English. A few people brought supplemantary articles, poems, or teachings. One person brought a nifty set of illustrations on "Chad Gadya" from early last century, done by some famous artist (sorry, I'm not up on my famous artists) who was a contemporary of Chagall, if I'm not mixing up my references.

The only people I knew in advance were Gail, her parents, and (minimally) the other person who'd been at the meeting, but due to fortunate seating assignments that were surely intentional, I got to know some other folks by the end (and got to know that other person from the meeting better).

I gather that the seder ran a little longer than they're used to, though only some of that was the extra bits we added. More was the schmoozing, I think, and since schmoozing is a sign of a successful gathering, why fret? We started around 6:30 and I think I left around 11:15.

Thursday I had three guests for lunch, which was fun. (Tried for a few more but ran into conflicts. One couple will come on the last day of the holiday instead. I hadn't been planning for guests for that day, but now that I have some I will invite some more.)

Menu from lunch: chicken in a tomato sauce (with oregano, garlic, pepper), roasted veggies & potatoes (white, gold, red-skinned, sweet; plus carrots and onions), roasted asparagus, fruit salad, and these semi-cookie semi-candy toffee-like things I bought on a lark (never seen 'em before) that turned out to be a huge hit. Someday I will learn to make vegetable kugel, but this wasn't the day. (I figured people might be too loaded up on matzah to want farfel or the like.)

Tuesday I had received an invitation from a neighbor and former coworker to a second-night seder, but Thursday afternoon he called to say that his wife had injured herself and they'd decided against doing it. I hope she's feeling better soon. Some other time, then. (She edits her own haggadah every year and I enjoy reading siddurim, haggadot, and other liturgical materials. That's how I ended up with an invitation. I assume she'll save this one for next year.)

I didn't try to find another seder for last night; I don't observe a second day of the holiday so it's not necessary, and while I would like to broaden my experiences (I go to other synagogues sometimes too, just to see how other folks do it), walking around Squirrel Hill knocking on doors really wasn't appropriate. If I'd been seder-less on the first night, sure, but not for this. (Aside: most people who would hold a second seder also wouldn't answer the phone on a holiday.)

Shabbat will be quiet (no guests, no invitations). I'm leading services tonight, and there's no bar mitzvah tomorrow so our morning service can be leisurely.

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the conveniences [sic] of modern life

Let me sing the praises of the disposable foil pan. Yes, it's wasteful, bad for the environment, etc; I get that. But because of disposable foil pans, there is an entire category of cookware that I do not have to have a duplicate set of for one week a year. That means I'm not shlepping heavy casseroles and roaster pans up and down the basement steps, storing them, etc. It is a marvelous thing to be able to cook for a dozen or more people without maintaining all the extra items I would otherwise need.

But alas, all is not perfect.

Dear manufacturer: I have certain expectations of even disposable cookware. I expect a pan called a "roaster" to be able to hold the weight of a roast, for instance. My pan of root veggies weighs considerably less than a roast, and is more distributed across the pan. And roasters, of course, should be able to handle fat -- juices from meat or, in my case, the oil poured over the veggies.

Your loss of structural integrity while I was rotating the pan was not welcome on this particular night. I already cleaned the oven once. :-( Yes yes, I know -- my oven sucks, and if I replaced it with a modern one maybe I wouldn't have to rotate my pans so things cook evenly. But, oh maker of the foil cookware, that should be my call, not yours.

Oh well. The oven is clean (again), maybe not as clean as the first time but good enough. Hey, it's not smoking. And my veggies are once again on their way.

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random (Jewish) bits

The morning minyan has a particular person who always leads Hallel when it's included in the service (certain holiday seasons plus Rosh Chodesh, the first day(s) of every month). I lead the service on Thursdays, but if it's a Hallel day I turn it over to him at that point. A couple months ago he said "you need to start doing this"; I replied that I didn't want to usurp his role; he replied that I would do it next time. (Ok.) "Next time" is this Thursday, Rosh Chodesh Nissan. So I just ran through it; I'm comfortable with most of it, am unsure what melody to use in one place, and just plain don't know the melody he uses in one short place, but the world won't end if I just read that (and maybe I can get a quickie refresher before the service starts). Now, to see how this plan survives contact with the minyan. :-)

Err, yes, that does mean that Pesach is just over two weeks away. I'm looking forward to a seder with friends and singing. I should decide soon if I'm going to try to do something for the second night. (I don't hold it to be necessary, but it would be a learning opportunity. Hmm.)

Last week I co-led a workshop at my synagogue on a topic in prayer (the sh'ma and its blessings). Turnout was small and I felt kind of off the whole time, even though we prepared and I practiced. (The other person is a professional educator; I have no idea if she practiced, but if she didn't it didn't show.) I've received positive feedback from people who were there, but I still have the sense that I don't really know how to facilitate a discussion or teach an intimate class, though I'm a fine participant in either. (I don't know that I know how to present a lecture either, but I think I'd be on firmer ground -- but that's not what was called for here.) I'm not sure what to do about this -- the obvious answers being to teach more or teach less. (I'm leaning toward the latter but feeling like a bit of a coward for that leaning.)

Learning talmud with my rabbi and midrash with another of our rabbis continues to be quite nifty and engaging. For all that I can be nervous in a classroom (particularly if someone with superior knowledge is present), I really enjoy and hold my own in one-on-one study with people whose knowledge is vastly superior to mine. I wonder why that works like that. Sure, a lot of the comfort in one case comes from having studied with my rabbi (in various capacities) for more than ten years (!), but the other one is much newer so it's not just that. (I also wonder at what point I have the obligation to be the person with superior knowledge for someone else in a one-on-one setting.)

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let all who are hungy come and eat

A previous entry has spawned a discussion in comments that I want to call out, because two days is forever in blog time and I have some readers who might be interested.

The magid (in many ways the main part of the Pesach haggadah) begins with the following declaration: "This is the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt. Whoever is hungry -- let him come and eat. Whoever is needy -- let him come and celebrate Pesach!" (This is known as "ha lachma anya", for the opening words -- which are in Aramaic, the then-common tongue, so that they would be understood.)

I, and most liberal Jews I know, interpret this pretty broadly; we would invite a Jew or a gentile who expressed interest. Some traditional readings say this applies to a Jew only, pointing out that "come and celebrate Pesach" was originally about joining in the korban (animal sacrifice), which is only applicable to Jews. But (as someone pointed out else-thread), you must include your servants under most circumstances, even if they're non-Jews, so clearly there is some room for interpretation here.

I have a lot of readers who are learned in such matters, so I pose the question to you: whom do you feel obligated to include per "ha lachma anya", and who else would you include anyway? What are the issues?

Personally, I would include anyone who asked out of apparent sincerity, Jewish or not. I don't really care if the person is a seeker exploring Judaism or just curious; if he wants to learn enough to show up, he's welcome. The only bar would be to someone who has made it clear that his goal is to harrass, or who somehow poses a serious threat to me or my other guests. (That's hypothetical, but I include it for the sake of completeness.)

I am also mindful that I was that outsider once, that then-gentile who crashed a seder at the last minute because I realized it mattered. So there's some amount of "pay it forward" in my reaction, but it's not just that. I want to be the kind of person who says "of course; we'll just add a chair to the table", and the kind of person who is approachable in matters of religion.

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what makes a good seder?

On Friday a coworker asked me how my Pesach sedarim had been and I said "eh", and she said something like "that's too bad -- mine was great". Hey, I thought to myself, I didn't know you were Jewish. She saw my puzzled expression: no, she's Roman Catholic, but several years ago she asked friends if she could join their seder because she was curious, and it was great, so she does it every year now. She described some of what they did and I was drooling inside. ("I thought of you!" she said. Rub it in. :-) )

Edited to add: let me be clear that everyone involved in the sedarim I went to acted with good will. These are good people; we just have some differences in approach that are turning out to be hard. Clear? (end edit)

The thought of "how come my Roman Catholic friend gets a more fulfilling seder than I do?", combined with a recent discussion in a locked entry, leads to this question: what is it that makes a seder fulfilling for me? What elements make me come away at the end feeling that I'd been at a good seder? (I encourage y'all to chime in.)

( Read more... )

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trip to Toronto

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visit to Village Shul

We were in Toronto for a few days, so Shabbat morning I went to services at the Village Shul, which is run by Aish HaTorah. We don't have Aish in Pittsburgh, so I was curious. I understand them to be in methodology kind of similar to Chabad -- friendly outreach to people at various levels of observance -- without the chassidism and the strange moshiach stuff. So I figured I'd go there and see what it was like, and if it was horrible I had a backup a few blocks away.

( Read more... )

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pesach,
talmud

a little talmud

At the end of this morning's service the rabbi did some teaching of his own. (This isn't usual, but through logic that I'll explain if asked and punt otherwise, doing so was useful today specifically.) He brought the mishna about our obligation to remember the exodus from Egypt both during the day and at night. Some of this is in the haggadah; since my family skips that part I was glad to have it here. In short, the torah passage says "all the days", but if it just meant "the days" it could have said so, so "all the days" means day and night. (The torah, like a good technical spec, is not supposed to contain unnecessary words.)

This obligation is fulfilled in the liturgy in the paragraphs after the sh'ma ("I am the lord your god who brought you out of Egypt..."). This passage ends the paragraph about tzitzit (fringes), which (the torah says) we are to wear so that we will see them and remember the mitzvot. We don't wear tzitzit at night (because it says you have to see them; the mishna predates good lighting). So, the rabbi asked, why do we read about tzitzit at night and not just in the morning? He gave Rashi's answer, that we say that paragraph because of the exodus part (and I guess the rest just gets brought along).

I offered a different answer: if we need the fringes to remember the mitzvot, and we need to read about that in the morning even though we're already doing it, then how much the moreso would we need to read that passage at night when we aren't wearing them? To this the rabbi said that I grok talmudic reasoning. :-)

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pesach

Pesach favor?

Google isn't turning this up for me, so before I do it myself: does anyone reading this have transliteration for Dayeinu, Israeli/Sephardi pronunciation, and if so could you send it to me? I don't mean the three verses everybody sings (hotzianu, shabbat, torah); got those a-plenty, thanks. I'm looking for the rest [1], for the folks at the seder who can't read the Hebrew.

[1] Actually, the subset of the verses that can be made to fit the standard repetitive kind-of-annoying melody, which is the only melody I have ever heard for that text.

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random bits

Recently (to investigate something), I added a third-party tracker to some of my posts in order to see where the hits are coming from. This was meant to be temporary, but I've found it interesting to see just how big the internet community is, so I've continued to use it at times. So, I don't know who any of y'all are (and publishing on the internet means I might never know, and that's cool), but I'd like to say hello to my regular readers in Italy, Moldova, Switzerland, and Cambodia (!).

We are having weird modem luck. I thought all DSL modems were basically the same, but apparently not. Our old (bought in 1999) modem has started dropping signal -- it's eratic, but when it happens it lasts for a few hours. My DSL provider mailed me a new one (a level of service I did not expect) and it's reliable but universally slow. So our current mode of operation is to use the old one until it drops and then switch to the new one for a few hours. Weird. So I think we need to buy a new modem that is both reliable and fast, but since I thought they were all the same I now don't know what to look for. (We have basic DSL. Someday I hope they well run FIOS to our neighborhood and we'll switch.)

Recent conversation:
Dani: We're out of (book)shelf space in the library again.
Me: Maybe we should assemble that last bookcase we bought.
Dani: We're out of shelf space in the library again.
Me: You built it and filled it already? So we need to buy more?
Dani: We're out of wall space to put bookcases...

(I assert that he is incorrect on that last point, but it hinges on a dispute between practicality and purity. Or something like that.)

We bought some CFLs (in two different color-tones) to try again, and installed some in the ceiling fixture in the living room (the packaging contained no dire warnings about that, unlike the last one). Freaky white and bright, so some tuning is called for, but there might be a bigger problem: flicker. The switch is a dimmer, but we know CFLs don't dim so the switch is at max. (Truth to tell, we don't dim regular bulbs in that fixture, either.) Does the mere presence of a dimmer switch doom CFLs? That would be annoying.

A couple links:

A few nights ago I made these lamb chops, which I've made before and which are amazingly good.

The ten plagues, done in peeps (from someone on my subscription list, but I've lost track of who). Twisted! Funny!

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Pesach

The trip to Toronto was relatively benign. As I mentioned earlier, we spent some of it helping the family fight a computer problem and some of it at the ROM (open on Mondays, for future reference). Dani's mother seems to have decided we're the charoset experts and asked us to make it; we wanted to do it there, so we also had to find a store for ingredients.

Nomenclature: to me "grocery store" and "supermarket" have become pretty much synonomous. If I mean the small mom-and-pop store, that's the "corner grocery" or the "mom-and-pop grocery". Giant Eagle is a grocery store. (There is a new class of humongous stores (that are to real supermarkets as real supermarkets are to corner groceries); I don't know what these mega-supermarkets (humongo-marts?) are called yet.) None of this is true for Torontonians, though. A friend had asked us to look for "kinder eggs" (novelty candy), and when I asked if they'd have those at grocery stores I was told to go to a supermarket instead.

( seders )

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parsha bits,
pesach

parsha bit: Pesach

Rabbi Sheshet said in the name of Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah: he who despises the festivals (by working on them and not celebrating) is like one who worships idols. This is because the command to have no molten gods is immediately followed by the command to keep the festival of unleavened bread. (Pesachim 118a)

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pesach

Pesach

I probably won't be online much in the next few days due to Pesach. Chag sameach to those of you who celebrate. Happy Easter to some of the rest of you. Happy April to everyone else. :-)

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random bits

My mother-in-law's seder has some singing, but mostly in Yiddish. This year (finally) I seem to have earned enough points with the family; I asked if we could add some Hebrew songs, offering to do the work (compiling and copying), and she said (via Dani) to bring a few. Yay. I'm going to make one double-sided sheet (including sheet music for some), on the theory that there's no sense wasting paper and this way there's a choice. Tiny steps... (At this seder I enjoy spending time with the people and I dislike the haggadah. At my father-in-law's seder, the haggadah is fine but the people aren't interested in doing most of it.)

At work we're about to get some expansion space, and they just published the new seating chart. People were given the option to stay put or take their chances. One of our neighborhoods (oh, did I mention that we have designated neighborhoods? that turns out to be fun, actually) is unpopular due to the way the space is set up. Every person there save one moved out. No one moved in. So the seating chart shows Beth amidst a sea of numbered spaces. There was some talk today of renaming the neighborhood; an early proposal was something like "Beth's Fiefdom" but I suspect that the latest will stick: "Bethlehem". If it weren't so close to Pesach I'd bring her a loaf of bread. :-) ("Bethlehem" is an anglicization of "Beit Lechem", which is literally "house of bread".)

San Francisco is about to ban plastic bags from grocery stores, saying that this will cut down on 1400 tons annually sent to landfills. I wonder how they came up with that figure. Do they catalog the landfills? Are they simply assuming that all bags produced go to landfills and wouldn't otherwise? Have they considered that some of those bags are recycled and, when not available freely, will just be replaced by other plastic bags in landfills? For example, I use them when scooping out the litter box, dog owners use them for a similar purpose on walks, and I know people who use them in bathroom trash cans instead of buying small bags for that purpose. I am not (in this entry) arguing against the policy; I'm merely questioning their data analysis. How do they know how much, if any, reduction there will be in landfills?

This article on Roth IRAs (link from patrissimo) seems to suggest that a simple money-laundering exercise lets one bypass the restrictions on using Roth IRAs. How odd. If that's true, it would be a way for people in higher income brackets to hedge their bets, which seems counter to the intent of the Roth. (Traditional IRAs are tax-free on the way in and subject to income tax on the way out, which makes sense if you think you'll be in a lower tax bracket when you retire. If you don't trust that tax rates won't go up, though, a Roth IRA is insurance -- you pay the income tax on the way in and nothing when it comes out.)