This year's Simchat Torah services were, I'm pretty sure, the best we've had during my time there.

The evening service always includes consecration for new religious-school students, so there are tons of kids there, generally somewhat unruly. Sometimes in the past this has led to more being cut from the service than I'm comfortable with. This year that didn't happen; most notably, we got a full amidah that we could complete individually, rather than the usual congregational reading. (This is something we've been doing for a while in the morning minyan, but it's the first time I've seen it in our sanctuary.) I am very pleased.

(I suspect that being a Sunday may have helped with kid-control; they weren't coming from a day of school, with parents coming from a day of work. And there was a congregational dinner before services, too.)

This year we opened the back wall of the sanctuary; for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur we do that and fill the space back there with chairs, but this time it was left open. This meant there was much more room to dance, and everybody could see everything as the torah scrolls were carried around the room. I think that made a big psychological difference.

On Simchat Torah we make seven "processions" around the room with the torah scrolls while singing and dancing. These are called hakafot. In some (many? most? I don't know) congregations this isn't organized; people get up and join or drop out as they like and it just works. My congregation always invites people in groups for these, with the groups being things like "families with students in religious school", "new members", etc. At times this has ended up being so family-focused that there were people who went three times before I got to go once, and that was off-putting. This year the groups were better-chosen, including having some that were mutually exclusive and collectively all-inclusive. Yay. Meanwhile, our cantorial soloist and band did a great job of keeping the music flowing.

Inter-shul anthropology question: how long do you spend on your hakafot (total)?

The morning crowd was smaller and older, and we were joined by another local congregation. (We take turns for the festivals.) On the way in I asked my rabbi if he wanted me to read torah and he said sure and gave me an assignment. This is not the problem you might think it is; I know the portion and have read parts of it most years recently. One of the rabbis from the other congregation read the first half (end of the book of D'varim), and I and my rabbi split the other half (beginning of the book of B'reishit).

In the morning we had the cantorial soloist and our pianist but not the band, but the music was still nice and lively. The service was about what I expect for our combined services. I wish that Mishkan T'filah, our siddur, didn't reduce the prayer for rain (and the one for dew in the spring) down to practically nothing; having heard tal for the first time at Pesach in Toronto, I would have enjoyed hearing its bookend geshem. But I assume I just won't get that in the Reform movement; oh well.

I didn't go to the other synagogue for Sukkot last week [1], so I don't know how many people were there, but attendance yesterday was higher than I've come to expect for festival services. I'm glad to see that.

[1] Rather than walk two miles there and back I went to Young People's Synagogue a couple blocks from my house.

Simchat Torah went well for me this year. I felt more included than in past years; our rabbis are doing a better job of making it not just about kids. There was still a lot of kid stuff, but this non-parent adult did not feel as alienated as at some times in the past.

Friday night (we follow the Israeli calendar, so Friday rather than Saturday) was pretty packed, and also pretty rowdy because of a large number of kids. There wasn't a lot of actual dancing with the torah, but that's normal for my congregation and people had a good time regardless. Everyone who wanted got multiple chances at carrying either a torah scroll (adults who felt up to it), a scroll of the prophets (adults who wanted something lighter), or one of the small stuffed torah toys (kids). There was a lot of singing.

On Simchat Torah everyone who wants one gets an aliya. We do four, two at the end of D'varim and two at the beginning of B'reishit. (I don't know if that's the usual number, though those are the usual readings -- finishing and starting again being the whole point.) The way my rabbi makes sure everyone gets an aliya is to divide it up by birthdays in batches of three months. That works.

We had previously agreed that I would read (well, chant) the beginning of B'reishit. I had wondered how this would work -- if my rabbi did D'varim and then I did one aliya in B'reishit and then my rabbi did the last one, wouldn't that look a little funny? (I had offered to do as much of B'reishit as he wanted; I'm doing the whole thing next week for Shabbat.) Not to worry, though -- it turned out we had all three rabbis there, so each rabbi and I took one aliya. I really liked hearing from all three of them; one of them is very rarely on the pulpit. (His focus is education.)

My birthday was in the last batch, so after I finished reading I stayed up there for an aliya. So my rabbi handed me the other sefer torah to hold. (I don't know who was holding it before -- possibly the rabbi who was about to read.) None of the rabbis seemed interested in taking it back afterwards, so instead of going back to the congregation I (at the urging of the third rabbi) stayed up there for the conclusion of the torah service. Standing in front of the ark with all three of our rabbis felt indescribably special.

Saturday morning the crowd was smaller and mostly adults. It was also fun, with lower decibel levels. :-) I read again -- possibly a little better, as the previous night I had learned that with that scroll and that desk and a portion that (of course) starts at the top of a column, I couldn't get close enough to see well for the first several lines. (I pulled more of that torah reading out of my head than is, strictly speaking, proper.) After the service Friday night I found out where they keep a small stepstool -- ah, much better!

We have a beit midrash after services on the second Saturday of each month, and the rabbi in charge saw no reason to change that just because it's Simchat Torah. So we had a nice little study session around some midrash about the death of Moshe and his numerous appeals to God (and the angels, and the sun and the moon, and...) to get to go into the land. I'd heard some of this before but not all of it. Interesting stuff.

And thus ends the marathon of fall holidays.

We got a huge crowd for the evening Simchat Torah service (Wednesday night). There were lots of kids; someone had organized a gathering before services where the kids could make paper flags to parade around with, and I suspect that made a difference. (We always get lots of kids, but the "lots" seemed bigger this year.)

Lots of kids means lots of noise, especially when you factor in today's trend toward permissive/oblivious parenting, and that continued through the first two aliyot of the torah reading (read by our two rabbis). As I went up to read the third and fourth aliyot (from B'reishit), I mentally braced myself for the distraction.

I should mention that the previous aliyot were read, not chanted. I began chanting -- and everyone shut up, just like that. Wow! I don't think they were just being polite to the layperson; I must conclude that it was the unexpected music that did it. I won't complain. :-)

I got compliments that night (and the next morning when I repeated it), which is not uncommon (it's polite, after all). The person who stopped me on the street to compliment me was a little unusual, and the rabbinic student who told me Shabbat evening that he was especially pleased with the way I'd chanted one phrase made me happy. It's nice to know that those little details matter to people other than me. :-) (This was, in fact, a passage I'd worked on to get the expressiveness right.)

The hakafot (dancing, or at least parading in a somewhat-perky manner) were more lively this year than in the past. We've been attracting more Israeli members (I suspect because of our Israeli rabbi); maybe that's part of it, as they bring in the enthusaism that (I'm told) characterizes this holiday there. Some of it is coming from the rabbis and cantorial soloist, for sure. I think we've got a fair number of congregants who will follow a lead to cut loose a little but won't lead, which isn't surprising.

Thursday morning during one of the hakafot I had a sefer torah that had silver crowns on it (not all of ours do), and the crowns had bells on them. So I could produce sound effects in time to the music. :-) (The scroll was too heavy for me to safely hold over my head, alas, especially as it was wound to one end. At other times I had smaller ones that I could do that with.)

Learned in passing: we are one of three (Reform?) congregations in the US that has a complete set of Nevi'im (Prophets) and Ketuvim (Writings) on scrolls. (I do not know how this came to be.) We pretty much only use these on Simchat Torah and Kol Nidrei, alas; most bar-mitzvah students want to read their haftarot with the permitted vowels, which you can't really blame them for. (While we read torah on Friday nights, we do not read haftarah then.)

This weekend we'll read the end of the torah and then go right into the beginning again. As I noted in this morning's parsha bit, there is a rabbinic interpretation that Moshe wrote the whole torah (dictated by God), including the part that talks about his death, and that he cried while doing this. Moshe had complete knowledge of what was to come and was powerless to change it. That sort of knowledge is not generally considered to be a blessing. If we understand that this writing occurred while Moshe was on Har Sinai, then he lived with this knowledge for 40 years. (I'm not advocating that interpretation, just speculating about what it implies.)

After reading this ending that Moshe knew and couldn't avoid, we then go straight into B'reishit where we read about the first humans, Adam and Chava. They had no knowledge whatsoever at first; they were completely free of the burdens that come from knowing. But that, too, was not ideal; they ate from the tree and they had to eat from it in order to become thinking, functioning human beings.

The torah ends with perfect knowledge and begins with total lack of knowledge (when it comes to people). Neither is a desirable state and neither is sustained. (No one other than Moshe ever got that level of privilege.) The contrast struck me as interesting in a hard-to-articulate way. Perhaps a lesson is that while we should strive for more knowledge (especially certain types), we shouldn't wish for a complete understanding even if such were achievable. There are lines we ought not cross at both ends of the knowledge spectrum.

( 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.

Busy weekend!

( Simchat Torah )

( SCA: baronial investiture )

( Sunday with family )

( Sunday dinner )

All in all, a fun and busy weekend.

Today's email included spam for a product that will "thicken [my] penis". I think I'll pass. That's even weirder than the Viagra spam and the spam addressed to African-American women (in which category I do not fit).

Today was the Great Race, which starts pretty much in front of our house. I can live with the necessary sound, once a year, of a few thousand people getting set up to run a race. However, blasting music for more than an hour (starting at 8am) at volume levels that would get me cited for disorderly conduct if they came from my house is inappropriate. I wonder who the correct body is to complain to. (City council?)

I guess this race just has bad karma for me or something. In 1999, the first year we lived here, Dani and I got tickets (and threat of towing; someone rang the bell at 7am) for being parked on the street. The "no parking" signs were apparently invisible that year in our block. Dani paid the ticket; I went to traffic court and the judge dismissed it. (After: "And how long have you lived in Squirrel Hill?" "We moved into the house 10 days before this happened." "Ok, dismissed. Just so you know, they do this every year and they're not real good about signs." I didn't ask if there was something the courts could do about that deficiency.)

( Simchat Torah )

( Coronation )
We picked up a different universal remote today. It claims to support a Sampo DVD player. I successfully configured it for the TV and two brands of VCR. I configured it for the DVD player using the provided code (which matches the one we found via google and that didn't work for the other remote), and it didn't work. I wonder if there's something wrong with the player -- its own remote works fine, though, so probably not. With the first remote, the "try all codes" feature didn't turn it up either. I haven't tried it with the second yet. (The second is the better remote in many other ways, though, so I know that's the one we're keeping.)

Over the past week or so I have come to realize that thermostats are fundamentally mis-designed. At our office, as at most offices, we have access to heat and AC year-round; there's a thermostat somewhere, and when reality doesn't match the setting you get a correction. (This past summer the AC failed several times, so it was sometimes over 80 degrees, but that's not part of the design.)

But during these in-between seasons where it might be 60 one day and 75 the next, what you really want to be able to do is specify a range. For example, if we drop below 66 turn on the heat, if we rise above 72 turn on the AC, and if we're between those two *do nothing*. Blasts of cold air to bring it down to the upper 60s when the weather outside is winter-like are just plain incongruous.

On a different note, I went to Simchat Torah services last night at Tree of Life, and that definitely worked out better than my past experiences at Temple Sinai. I'll keep doing that for this particular holiday. (No one actually danced at ToL either, but at least people seemed to be enjoying themselves.)

Their turnout for Simchat Torah was better than ours was for Sukkot. I wonder if that's the holiday or the congregation at work. (I think the congregations are about the same size.)

Sunday Dani and I spent some time visiting with the Horowitzes. (Laura invited us over to visit their sukkah, but then it was so cold that we spent most of the time inside.) You know, we really ought to see them more frequently given that we live a block away...

On Saturday we had some people over to play games. We were hoping to play Age of Rennaisance or History of the World, both of which are for 5-6 players, but we ended up with 7. (If we had gotten 8 or 9 people, we would have split into two groups.) The only games we have that work well for 7 are Diplomacy (yuck) and Civilization (good), so we played Civ. We decided we wanted to have more conflict in the game, so we ignored the advice in the instructions to use the map extension and just played on the main map. We still didn't get all that much conflict; people were just more motivated to get advances such as Agriculture, which let you make do with less land. Things might have been different if one player hadn't had to leave before the game was over, though; while we're all basically nice people who don't wantonly attack each other, it's easy to wantonly attack an abandoned position. So instead of us all picking on each other in the end-game when land was really scarce, we all picked on ex-Robert. :-)

We also played a quick game of Merchants of Amsterdam, a game Dani picked up recently. (Dani, Ralph, and I had played part of a game a week earlier.) The game seems to be mis-callibrated; the balance of money is about right in the early stages, but in the mid-game it's way off. Bidding games should be resolved by who has the strongest bid, not by who can hit the bid-timer most quickly. If we play again we'll probably switch to written bids, which loses some of the interactive character of auctions.

The season premiers of both "Earth: Final Conflict" and "Andromeda" were on Sunday night. I've enjoyed E:FC pretty much all along (there were some weak spots but the overall arc was interesting); I'm not sure I like the twists they introduced for the beginning of this (final) season. We shall see. Andromeda, which ended last season with everyone all but dead, actually worked reasonably well. There were definitely places where I could not suspend disbelief, and a lot will depend on what they do next, but it's working so far.

Both of these shows have Roddenberry's name splattered all over them, but there's little indication of how much of this was actually his work. Did he write up broad outlines only, or script it in more detail, or what? I could do with less of the name-dropping hype, but oh well. I fast-forward through credits and commercials anyway.

Well, I do watch opening credits once per season, because they always change from year to year. Speaking of opening credits, I hate the theme music for the new Trek show. I feel no need to roll *those* credits in real time again.

Sukkot is over, but now it's freaking cold here. I hope we get a warm Sunday before the snow comes so I can take the sukkah down.