Monica

We are now in the Ten Days of Repentance, the period of time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur when we go into overdrive to try to repair any damaged relationships we have with each other.

If there is anything which I did over the past year which hurt or upset you, please let me know. If you want to discuss it publically, please leave a comment below; if you'd like to discuss it privately, send me email (address is in my profile).

I will do my best to make amends and make right anything which I have done wrong.

I don't promise that I can. But I do promise that I will try.

[The above was largely swiped from goljerp, who got it here. I was already planning to write something similar tonight but I decided to just adapt this, as the original poster invited people to do so.]

This was a good Rosh Hashana. Services were good, I was able to do something useful, and we had friends over for lunch. (I'll write about lunch in a separate entry.)

( service styles )

( service to something bigger than oneself )

( logistics )

On my way out on Saturday I ran into someone who asked me, for reasons unknown, if I was on my way to Young People's (an Orthodox congregation). I said no, but that gave me an idea. I've been meaning to visit YPS but the logistics just haven't worked out. They're holding their HHD services at the JCC, halfway between Temple Sinai and my house, and their advertising seems to imply that tickets aren't needed. So maybe, after our morning service is over, when I need to fill a couple hours anyway, I'll wander over there to see what (part of) an Orthodox Yom Kippur service is like. (I can stash my tallit somewhere in Temple Sinai, avoiding the awkwardness of walking into an Orthodox shul carrying a tallit. Women don't wear them there. This is the main reason I've never stopped in at YPS on Shabbat morning on my way home.) If they require tickets, I've wasted 15 minutes and I can just go back to our library and find something to read. If they don't, I might learn something while also spending that time in an environment suited to the seriousness of the day. And I know they won't have an organ, and probably won't have a choir. :-)

Coronation was Saturday, and local, so we went. ( Read more... )

The schedule for the evening at my synagogue was a program of some sort (mainly discussion), then a bit of a social (cookies and lemonade), and then the S'lichot service. I got there just as the social part of this was starting, so I ended up with about 15 minutes to spare. (In an ideal world I wouldn't have missed any of it, but I knew that wouldn't happen. My goal was to not miss the service.)

Traditionally S'lichot begins at midnight, but that isn't a popular idea at my synagogue. So we started around 10 and finished up around 11 or so. I'm reminded of some very pretty music that I haven't heard since Yom Kippur last year. (Most of the formal music that shows up for the high-holy-day services is too "artistic" and operatic for me, but last night's mostly wasn't like that.)

Today I learned of one glitch in the HHD part assignments, which I'll try to fix tomorrow. We have a rehearsal (more like blocking, so people know who goes where when) on Wednesday. I'm participating in the Yom Kippur morning service (I have the haftarah blessings).

Today was mostly errands and household foo. We watched two more episodes of West Wing tonight, and got a really good laugh during mostly-serious episodes. I'm glad the funny bit came right before the opening credits. :-)

Rosh Hashana is soon. I bought some extra food on spec today (chicken doesn't go bad, after all :-) ), because I ordered guests for dinner Friday and don't know yet if I'm getting them. I should know by Wedenesday. (Well, "ordered" might not be the right word. I let the person who's organizing such things know that I would welcome guests for that meal, and she'll tell me soon if I'm getting any. I have different guests for Saturday lunch already.)

Rosh Hashana went well. Some other time maybe I'll write about services and sermons and stuff. Short takes: There was, predictably, some discussion of 9/11. While I generally don't care for the formal, grandiose music of the high holy days, Shira (our cantorial intern) has a beautiful voice and I really liked her "Avinu Malkeinu". I think I dislike our synagogue president, who just oozes "slick salesman" whenever he speaks publicly. (The president always gives a short address sometime during HHD services.)

We had Fran, Alan, and Gail over for lunch on Saturday. I made honey-roasted chicken, yams, raw veggies with hummus, and a tossed salad -- and of course we had apples and honey, challah, and my traditional starfruit. They brought some really tasty (parve) chocolates. (For the chicken, on Thursday night I drizzled it with honey and then broiled it for about 15 minutes, then on Saturday cooked it in a crock pot with the yams. I was hoping the broiling would seal in the juices and keep it from drying out, and this was almost successful.)

( kiddush geekery )

A few days ago goljerp raised the question of why we don't say the Rosh Chodesh (new month) prayers on Rosh Hashana. Rosh Hashana is, after all, a new month as well as the beginning of the new year.

I asked Rabbi Berkun this morning, and his answer is that Rosh Hashana, being a much bigger deal, replaces Rosh Chodesh. (He says, by the way, that we do not do the Rosh Chodesh additions to bentching, the prayer after a meal, so there's no inconsistency between liturgy and home observance after all.) Someone else had an interesting comment: Rosh Hashana commemorates the creation of the world; therefore, there was no time before RH and RH isn't a "new" month but the first month. So the first Rosh Chodesh would be the beginning of the following month. I find this explanation somewhat elegant.

For those who might be wondering why we keep the Shabbat prayers in the service on a holiday when the preceeding would seem to suggest that this should be omitted, it's because Shabbat is more important than holidays. Yes, really. The only Shabbat concession we make for a holiday is that if Yom Kippur falls on Shabbat we do in fact fast on that day. Yom Kippur is described in Torah as the "Shabbat of Shabbats", though, so it's special.

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?)

I work 4 or 5 blocks from Mallorca. Normally that is both too pricy and too much food for me to go there for lunch, but today, in preparation for the fast, that's what I did. Their portion sizes (at least for lunch) are truly astonishing; I had a huge piece of tuna, and it came accompanied by a plate of vegetables, a plate of rice, a plate of potato chips, a small loaf of bread, and a salad. (Needless to say, I did not eat all of this -- though I ate much more than I would have on a normal day.)

They do the side dishes family-style, so if you go there with another person they'll bring the single plate of rice, plate of veggies, and so on. What seems a little odd to me is that when you go there alone they don't scale those back. I would have expected a plate with the tuna, some rice, some veggies, etc, all on one plate.

This was a $12 lunch, by the way -- expensive for lunch in general, but quite reasonable for the food that went with it. (And Mallorca food is yummy, too, so it's not just a quantity thing.)

I finally learned the secret of fasting last year. You don't eat a huge dinner half an hour before sundown. You eat a huge lunch and a small dinner. (And drink as much water as you can possibly hold, of course.)

Wow, I never thought I'd hear those words come out of the mouth of a Reform rabbi.

It's like this. The one thing that makes me feel very awkward as a Reform Jew isn't a matter of ritual, or halacha, or theology. Sure, I have disagreements there, but my disagreements ae in the Reform spirit of "go and study"; being a fairly-observant Jew who believes that God really did speak to Moshe at Sinai is not inconsistent with Reform, even if it might get me some funny looks at times. No, the area where it appears that we part ways more seriously is that of politics: most Reform Jews I've met, and the Reform party line, are so far to the left that FDR looks like a ruthless hardliner.

So when political discussions come up at shul, I remain quiet. When the gun-control petitions circulate, I ignore them (or, if pressed, politely decline). When the campaigns to raise taxes for social programs that we ought to be voluntarily supporting through tzedakah, not forcibly and inefficiently supporting through taxes, come around, I find other places to be. And so it goes.

So when it became clear that our associate rabbi was going to use the Rosh Hashana pulpit (Monday night) to talk about Israel, the Palestinians, and terrorism, I braced for the worst.

But he didn't go where I expected him to go. He started by saying that he really wanted to believe in the possibility of a peace treaty, and that the Palestinian Authority could negotiate in good faith, and that there existed a solution that resulted in a Palestinian state and a secure Israel. But he went to Israel this summer and, while there, spoke with some Knesset members along with the "civilians" (like the rabbis he went there to see, and folks on kibbutzim, and so on). And he came away with the understanding that Arafat and his subordinates do not want peace with Israel; they want a Palestinian state "from the river to the sea", with Israel gone, and anything else is just an intermediate step on the path to that. (I've believed that for months, with that interview in June with one of Arafat's main people cementing it. He said this was their goal and allowed it to be printed.)

So what should Israel do about it? Are targetted assassinations so bad? Rabbi Freedman didn't come out and say he supports them, but he clearly does. Not because assassination is good, but because it beats the alternatives. (An almost-quote: "What would you do if you knew with certainty that someone was planning a bombing? Stop him before he can act, or wait until he's killed 15 people and maimed dozens and then condemn the act? What would you do?")

He didn't talk directly about the attacks on the US last week, but he did say that we are beginning to understand what Israel faces every single day, and maybe we should look to them for ways of fighting terrorism. (Aside: the counter-argument is that it doesn't seem to be working. Of course, it might work better than anything else. Who knows?)

He said this does not make him a hawk; he's not advocating full-scale war and indiscriminant killing. He'd rather believe that peace is possible -- but in the case of Palestine, giving them what they want in hopes of peace is a bad idea. (He did not actually offer a thought for what Israel should do, beyond what it's currently doing, but that's a very hard problem so I'm not surprised.)

After the service I complimented him, said I had never expected to hear those words from a Reform pulpit, and welcomed him to the moderate right. :-) (I'm not sure how he took that last part.)


This morning the senior rabbi spoke eloquently (in a way that doesn't summarize well) on the themes of prejudice and helping each other. One point was that since any of us could have been on those planes, our lives from last Tuesday forward are gifts and we should think about how we use them.

I spent a little time this afternoon looking over my part for Yom Kippur. (I'm leading part of the mincha service.) Y'know, I can sound out anything in Hebrew if you give me time, but I'm glad I looked this over far enough in advance to do something about the short phrase that was missing its vowels. That's upping the ante. :-) (Doing something consisted of handing it to Dani, who figured it out from context. But you actually have to have a vocabulary for that trick to work.)

Dani says he's willing to answer Hebrew questions from me, so maybe I'll get out that textbook and take another crack at learning the language. I'd like to be able to comprehend and not just pronounce, after all. I'm getting better; I was able to just listen to today's Torah reading and follow it, though of course I knew what it would be going in so it's not like parsing completely-free text. But I have a long way to go. And I still grok only a tiny bit of the grammar.