Magic Jewball

Happy New Year! Am I insane? Yes! But completely aside from that, this month, Nisan, is actually the first month of the Jewish calendar even though we celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the common New Year, in Tishrei, which falls in September. The Jewish calendar actually has four new years days:

1st of Nisan – new year for the reign of kings as well as holidays
1st of Elul – most obscure one, it was for tax purposes (how apropos)
1st of Tishrei – what we call Rosh hashanah – anniversary of the day the world was created
15th of Shvat – what we call Tu B’shvat, the new year for trees

Anyhoo, I’m taking the occasion of the first holiday of the year, Passover, which starts tomorrow, to clean out my phone of photos.

Remember I said I’d show you the empty elevator cage in the building where I work at school? And that I never noticed that the stairs wound around an elevator size shaft while all the time wondering why there was no elevator? No? Me either. But here it is.

Button, button, where’s the button? No, I never noticed this either, I swear.

I did notice this. It was a giant inflatable rat outside Petco on my way to my internship one morning. So either they had a union problem or one of the giant rats at Petco escaped and was menacing passersby.

Oh look, it’s the last holiday, Purim. I guess I’ll finish with food I won’t be eating for the next eight days. Here was the line-up this year: Hamantaschen in my usual raspberry and Nutella flavors, brown sugar pound cake, chocolate chip crack, and tootsie rolls. I made three things instead of four this year in deference to the fact that I’m already trying to fit 25 things into a 24 hour day.

And now, a Passover/festival of freedom/Emancipation Day/springtime thought. Recently, I saw Waiting For Superman, a movie I refused to pay for and so I had to wait seven months till I could see it for free. Lots of the statistics in it are wrong or misleading and even though there are great public schools and terrible charter schools (the filmmaker even states that 80% of them have worse performance than public schools), the main point still stands. Education in this country blows. Not only do kids drop out and make bad neighborhoods worse because they can’t get jobs, not only do we still stiff the very people we emancipated, but who is going to cure cancer or solve problems when we’re old?

So what are we going to do about it? Let’s do something about it! Or let’s just do something to make the lives of other people better. I say, free your minds and the rest will follow. Or, actually, EnVogue said that. But you get me. It’s a whole new year. The farmers markets are filling up with new produce. The Shiba Inu webcam dog had new puppies. Your team has five months to get to first place. Let’s start fresh and do good things.

Chag sameach and happy Easter and springtime to my non Passover-celebrating friends.

Title comes from:
Bob Marley – Redemption Song

So Hannukah is winding down and although I haven’t felt very joyful this year, I do have a newfound appreciation for what is the season of miracles. And I am trying to shake myself out of my funk, but I’m not quite there, I think. I’ve mostly kept my Internet presence to this blog and e-mail, which is weird for me, but I am feeling a little unsocial at the moment. Still, I have been saving this item for a month or so and meant to post it just before the holiday. Anything that involves me pulling out my scanner (the printer 3-in-1 is located under the coffee table, such is the New York apartment) will inevitably be put off and delayed. But here it is and it touches on themes I’ve discussed before about how Hannukah is made into something it’s not by American society (big! important! a holiday where families travel from far and wide to get together and bask in the glow of the menorah) and where many Jews try to make it into the Christmas they wish they had. As I’ve said, I get that it’s hard, especially with kids, to be enveloped in a holiday that seems warm and beautiful but which isn’t yours. In its wake, Hannukah has become the “but we have THIS” holiday. And I know that merchants will cater to that feeling.

So in the spirit of Catalog Living (which inspired the title of this post, in case you’re not on the CL express), I bring you this ad. Despite the fact that they are generically called “Blue/Silver Glass Star Ornaments,” the description helpfully adds for those who might be squinting at their placement near the Star of David tea lights and the clear Hannukah intent (you can’t see the Hannukah tableware on the same page and menorah opposite), “make festive table accents!” Yes, these are for your Hannukah table, not at all your Hannukah tree. Wink wink wink.

From Crate & Barrel holiday catalog

Makes you just want to throw another Maccabee log on the fire and gather round the menorah to sing carols, doesn’t it?

Audioslave – Be Yourself

I came home to this today. Which is lucky, because I thought Hannukah was Thursday and it’s actually tomorrow. It might have been a mistake to assume that Google Calendar knows what “Erev” means. What, they put Christmas Eve on there!

Anyway, the important thing to remember is that if your present isn’t in one of these boxes, you’re probably not getting one. Happy holidays!

The Jerky Boys – Special Delivery

(If you know me, wink wink wink to you on this track. You’ll know even by the 30 second snippet.)

My parents visited England in 1981 just before the wedding of Charles and Diana, and as much as they always loved London (and Paris and Amsterdam and Zurich… my father had a lot of frequent flyer miles working for IBM), they especially got a kick out of being there for all the pre-event hoopla. They brought back several typical Royal Wedding souvenirs partially for the kitsch factor but also to remember a lovely trip, The one I remember most was a box of matches emblazoned with the standard portrait of the couple in an oval plus banner with the date of the wedding. And what I remember about it is that it lasted for years and years, even though we used matches every week to light the sabbath candles. That was my job, to set up the candles. I’d put the two big candlesticks in the middle of the dining room table, fill each cavity with just a bit of water to keep the melted candles from dripping down onto the tablecloth, and place the two white candles in. Occasionally… well, lots of times, if my mother was running late preparing for the sabbath, I’d light the candles for her and then she’d just have to say the blessing.

An aside about that. It’s a conundrum, saying the blessing over the candles before sabbath. In all of Judaism, you always say the blessing before doing the thing. The blessing for bread, then bread. The blessing for the wine, then the wine. But lighting candles involves starting a fire and you’re not allowed to do that on the sabbath. Once you say the blessing on the candles, the sabbath has started, and so then how are you supposed to light a fire? It’s like an Escher painting, when you try to think about it. So what you do is, you light the candles, then you cover your eyes so you can’t see them, and then you say the blessing, “Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments, and commanded us to kindle the light of the sabbath.” Then you uncover your eyes and suddenly, they’re lit. It’s like a miracle!

Anyway, since you can’t actually light the candles after sunset, sometimes I’d have to do that while my mother ran around (like a chicken with its head cut off, to use her expression) finishing cooking and cleaning and dressing, and then, just a bit late, she’d cover her eyes and say the blessing. But we almost never used the Charles & Di matches, even though they were on the top shelf of the cupboard. You’d use the red and blue safety matches, because, well, those didn’t symbolize a happy time in a country where everyone was excited. I wish the people in England a happy year of excitement and I wish William & Kate a happy marriage. May it last as long as the box of matches and then some.

The Doors – Light My Fire

I am not a big reader… of books. You wouldn’t know this from my apartment where an entire wall is made up of bookshelves with actual books on them, but really, I mostly read the Internet. Blogs, forums, newspapers and magazines on the web, etc. I was a voracious reader of books as a child and teen and it took me a long time to realize that I am still that reader, I just read different things. I do have a Kindle, which I bought at a giant discount from an upgrading friend, but it’s mostly for articles in pdf format which I read for school. Lately, though, I’m reading a riveting book of actual fiction on the ereader. I don’t really want to tell you what it is, though. My friend K. is in publishing and starts a book chat thread on our forum now and then. At first I was excited to finally have a real book to mention! And then I decided not to.

The reason I don’t want to tell people about it has something to do with Elizabeth Smart. Not the book, the book has nothing to do with her. At least I don’t think it does but I’m only 83% done (Kindles are good with that percentage thing) so I can’t really be sure. But I doubt it. I have been reading a lot lately about Elizabeth Smart because the trial of her kidnapper is going on and she testified all last week. Also, because I’m a true-crime junkie and the Petit trial ended the week before. When you read about Elizabeth Smart, her ordeal, and “the defendant” as she called him in court, you probably think one of two things: 1. Mormons have weird practices! That guy thought God told him to kidnap this girl and make her his second wife and that he was some kind of prophet! or 2. Mormons have strong faith! I would never have been able to get through that with my psyche intact and she is so composed and impressive on the stand.

This bothers me, even as I sort of do it myself. This guy was a nutjob having nothing to do with religion. If he’d been born in a Hindu community, he’d be a Hindu nutjob, period. On the flip side, maybe she’s just a really strong person who came from a loving family. Somehow, because we (outside Utah, probably) don’t know a lot of LDS people, these two become some sort of representatives of all the faith offers and is.

Recently, I read about the rapper Shyne becoming an Orthodox Jew of the strictest variety. He says it’s because he previously lived a life without boundaries and so he likes all the strict rules. I’ve always wondered why people convert, other than to marry someone. See, I think the things you grow up with are really hard to shake. I just feel when you are raised to see certain things as essential truths, it becomes very difficult to view it another way. But maybe that’s just me. I bring this up because Elizabeth Smart is currently on her mission in Paris and only took a break to come home and testify. I see LDS missionaries in New York all the time. They look very neat in their long skirts or suits and conservative haircuts. Once, after my shift proctoring at the big Orthodox Jewish University, I sat across from two of them on the subway. They looked very, very tired, but still tidy, and they had name tags on. One of them sat a couple of empty seats away from a Latino woman reading a book in Spanish. She started a conversation with the woman, seemingly about the book. I say seemingly because the entire conversation was in Spanish. The Latino woman did not look put out at all and they seemed to have a really nice, friendly, long conversation, which only ended when the woman got off the train.

And this is what I sometimes think: maybe, at first, it’s about the results and not the tenets of the faith. I mean, I would like to be as self-possessed and dignified as Elizabeth Smart and as wholesome and dedicated as the missionaries. And I think that reflects very well on them. I think this is what every person of a minority faith hopes to do, whether they are LDS or Muslim or Jewish: to keep your attention away from the small percentage of freaks or radicals and make you understand that the heart of the faith lies elsewhere. Somehow, though, it’s always the extremists and the fringe beliefs that grab people’s attention and set their opinions.

I write about a lot of great aspects of Judaism here. There are some not so great things about Judaism, as well. I just don’t choose to highlight them. It’s not because I’m perpetrating some great charade, it’s because, well, the world is already full of lots of bad press for Judaism. This is to correct myself and say that I have actually talked about the book I mentioned up top quite a lot. But to other Jews. They already know about our warts and won’t say, “wow! What nutbars those people are! I can’t believe that they do those things or such things go on.” Instead, they say, “it’s natural to do x, y, and z” or for certain things, “man, are those people doing it wrong.” But if you aren’t familiar with the actual rules, it’s hard to understand that.

Beyond what foibles we actually do have, people have these weird beliefs about Judaism and I know that because they search for outrageous things about it which reach this blog. Sometimes I roll my eyes and sometimes I despair. The only thing to do, really, is to highlight the good in a public space like this one and be the best representative of the positive in your faith and people as you can be. Also, to be pretty and blonde, if you can, but we don’t all succeed at that. Second choice is to make good pastry.

So, in conclusion, this was an excellent book and I’m glad I could tell you all about it.

BTW, I don’t even have a category here for Books! I would never have predicted that when I was a teenager. And not just because they didn’t have blogs then.
Simple Minds – Book of Brilliant Things