Word to the wise: if anyone asks you to lead two communal seders on two consecutive days, in cities several hundred miles apart, do not agree! Seriously, I had a lot of fun, even if it was completely exhausting.

( Pesach adventures )

You would not believe how tired I am, though. Even by yesterday, I was randomly falling asleep in the middle of conversations (sorry, SA!) and generally feel a bit as if my immune system is protesting at what I've put it through in the past few days. Oof. Happy Easter Christians, and chag sameach frum Jewish friends who should now be back online after three days of festival + shabbat.

I am on my way to Copenhagen to lead the seder for the Progressive community there, travelling by train, and this really does beat flying in every possible way. I have a big seat with loads of space, and I just got on the train at 8:30 this morning and will simply sit here in comfort until I get to Copenhagen mid-afternoon, no stress or messing around. And best of all, there is free teeeeeeeea and free internet. Life is good.

So I have a few hours to post about my insanely busy life in the past couple of weeks. ( why you haven't heard from me in a while )

Because I am completely insane, I'm leading one seder in Copenhagen tonight, then taking an early train back to Stockholm first thing tomorrow, and leading the second seder there tomorrow night. Thank goodness I have the Easter weekend to recover. It's very weird not being with my family for Pesach, I must say. Anyway it should be a memorable experience.

So my pal SS organized an interfaith peace service, for Jews, Muslims and Christians to get together in the middle of a big public square to pray for peace in Israel and Palestine, and to commemorate all the victims of the conflict. Making that happen took a lot of effort and skill at both logistics and diplomacy, so much kudos to him for doing it. He asked me to represent the Jewish contingent, so with some reluctance I agreed to do so.

The event took place on Monday evening, with a tenuous tie to Martin Luther King day in the States. It was snowing, but we had several dozen attendees all the same. And the event went off amazingly well; everybody managed to be sincere, even passionate, but kept within the spirit of the occasion, expressing nothing but respect and solidarity without politics or sectarianism. I am really proud to have been involved, and incredibly proud of SS for making that happen. And it was genuinely moving, not just warm and fuzzy as these things can often be (if they don't err the other way and use the prayer as an excuse for political soapboxing).

( more details )

By the way, if your conscience forces you to respond to this by claiming that all the war and violence in the world are caused by evil Israel with its evil empire of evil child-murdering ways, you're entitled to do that, but I'm afraid I'm not going to engage. Anything that even slightly hints at islamophobia will get deleted, though. I didn't take part in a hard-won interfaith initiative to encourage ignorance and prejudice.

I've had one of those weeks, a bit. I was idly checking my email on Monday morning, and realized that I had an extra committee meeting Monday evening, and a lecture Tuesday evening which I'd agreed to do ages ago and then forgotten about, on top of my usual class Thursday evening and running a service with Joanna on Friday. So it's been a bit manic, especially fitting all that round work commitments, but so far seems to have come out ok in the end.

( misc diary )

I'm back from an intense and enjoyable weekend. I've been out of touch with the Progressive world outside my own community for a number of years now, due to living too far from London or any of the other major centres. One of which is Berlin. When I heard of a joint conference between the British, German and Israeli young adults Progressive Jewish groups in Berlin, I decided I really ought to be there!

( my religious home far away )

The weekend really did leave me feeling refreshed and uplifted and really optimistic about the future of Progressive Judaism! There are some really awesome rabbinical students and engaged, young lay people at the moment, and what's going on in places like Poland, Germany and Russia is really stunning. You've got tiny communities of people rediscovering tenuous Jewish roots or even coming to Judaism for no reason other than getting excited about it, and they're really flourishing, and doing so in the places where devastation of Jewish life was most acute.

The fledgling Progressive community of Oslo invited me to visit them and run a shabbaton this weekend. I decided I'd do it, but use the excuse to have a little weekend break in a new exotic (to me) city. And cartesiandaemon was brave enough to agree to join me.

( Oslo adventures )

I really enjoyed working with this community. I got the impression that they really need me, not just someone, but me specifically. I'm not saying no-one else can contribute anything to them, obviously, but they like the fact that I'm young and clearly a lay person, yet coming from a position of knowledge, and they really seemed to respond strongly to my approach to Judaism. They also asked me how I felt about being "the token heterosexual", so of course I answered that I'm not all that het (um, yay bi visility?), and asked cartesiandaemon how he felt about being the rabbi's wife! Actually this is the first time I've dragged the Beau to a service; I was so committed to community stuff this weekend that we'd have had no time together if he skipped the boring religious bits as he usually does. He was very noble about it, anyway.

On the negative side, cartesiandaemon has given me his cold, but at least I had fun catching it, unlike my usual habit of picking up lurgies from all my colleagues who are parents of small children. I have to go to a conference tomorrow, and I'm speaking first thing on Friday morning, so I'd better get well by then. Not to mention I need to write my talk!

Various posts on my flist where people are summarizing their experiences of Yom Kippur. For my part, it was generally a positive day.

( YK notes )

It's become clear to me, partly because people were good enough to point it out directly, that a lot of where I've let people down this year is in not answering emails. I several close friends with whom my main interaction is by email, and quite a few other long distance contacts I'd like to keep in my life, and I am letting connections slip because I don't get round to writing the emails I intend to. Not to mention that it offends people, and may well annoy them if the emails contain practical details that need sorting out. I'm also bad at keeping up with the answering emails part of upholding my various responsibilities.

For one thing, if you're in the category of people I promised to write to and then fell down on it, I'm sincerely sorry. But a lot of the point of YK is that regret isn't enough, you have to do some fixing. So what I'm asking for is advice on how to manage emails sensibly. I've seen various methods and websites recommended; does anyone have any personal experience of methods that work? It's partly an aspect of the larger question of how I manage my time, which is a major, major problem for me. Still, do you have any suggestions for making sure to get to emails in a timely fashion? I've tried setting aside time, which I don't seem to be able to keep up, I've tried some methods of sorting emails and making to-do lists and such, but I haven't found anything that really works for me.

Another YK thing is giving to charity. I've donated to Kiva, which coordinates microloans to people in developing countries. This is the kind of charity that really appeals to me, partly because it's very individualized and grass roots, and partly because it's helping people to set up businesses and become independent, rather than dropping gifts of emergency aid on them, which can be harmful in the long term. But I tend to give very haphazardly; I see that YK is coming up, or think, oh, I haven't given anything to charity for a while. Do any of you have any good systems for making sure that you give a reasonable amount to charity (what constitutes a reasonable amount?) on a regular, systematic basis? If you'd like to recommend favourite charities, I'd be happy to hear about them too. And ideally I want to contribute effort as well as cash, which means something local, and I'm not sure how best to do that. Well, that's partly cos I am an expat and I don't know how things work here, but partly it's cos I just haven't got organized.

Thirdly, and connected to consumerism and not at all to religious stuff, my Beau is helping me acquire a new shiny eee. I have been hesitating whether I want a tiny baby computer, or a dedicated ebook reader, (or indeed a decent digital camera). I decided that the most useful geek toy would be the tiny computer, especially when I found a 701 (low spec but decent battery life) on ebuyer for less than £150. It's slightly scary that this computer is cheaper in absolute numbers than the BBC Micro we had when I was a kid, and indeed cheaper than quite a lot of cutting edge mobile phones. Anyway, it needs a name; my naming scheme so far has been G&S references (the two most recent computers I've owned were called Silver Churn and Sally Lunn), so does anyone have any good suggestions? I'm absolutely blanking on anything from G&S that refers to smallness, but I'm sure there must be something. Preferably with the same beat as the previous names, cos I'm anal like that.

This weekend the Stockholm Progressive group invited movers and shakers from various Scandinavian communities to join us in Stockholm for brainstorming and networking and such. It was very successful; we'd thought we would have to get people warmed up and encourage mingling between the groups, but in fact everyone was so enthusiastic we could hardly get them to cease chatting long enough to make official announcements.

I led a little mini service Friday night, and gave a short talk about this week's Torah portion this morning. It went so well that both communities (the Norwegian contingent is one couple, the Danes have a fully fledged serious community with a budget and long term plans and everything) have invited me to come and visit them and lead services / educational events for them. This is very cool, except that the Danish crowd want me to lead their Passover Seder, and I'm really not sure I can do that. I have only been away from my family for one Pesach in my life, and I know I would be horribly homesick if I miss it. Also, it's going to be only a few weeks before the end of my contract, which is a bad time to be taking significant time off work (they want me to come the weekend before, and stay for most of a week). I have already half-promised I'm going to teach the same course I did this year, which might clash. So I'm really in a dilemma about whether I should agree to do this. It would be a fantastic opportunity and a huge favour to a community who really need support, but it would disrupt two quite important parts of my life.

I volunteered to make a mailing list where we could discuss future collaborations and keep communication relatively centralized. And now I find this is actually harder to do than I thought. So can anyone recommend me a system? I need: ( requirements )

Having finished the business, we went out to dinner at Fåfängan, mainly for the sake of the most amazing view of Stockholm and the harbour; as EBH warned us, the food is fairly mediocre. But all in all it was a delightful day, and there are some fascinating people running the various Progressive communities.

Today was my last bat mitzvah for this academic year.

( mostly successful )

I hope I can find some more pupils for next year, otherwise I'm going to really miss the teaching!

Can anyone who understands these things explain to me how Pesach is supposed to work when it falls on Saturday night? We had a long debate about what we were supposed to do, and couldn't think of any way to coordinate things, and our haggaddahs weren't helpful at all.

I assume you're supposed to wait until shabbat is fully out to start the seder? We didn't bother, because it would have been ludicrously late at this time of year, but in theory, you're supposed to, right? Then what? How do you light the festival candles if it's already been chag for an hour? Are you supposed to mess around with tapers and a long-burning candle?

Obviously you do havdalah before starting the festival stuff, that's normal, but how exactly does it work? The best instructions we could find implied that you were supposed to do "between holy and holy" with only the candle, leaving out the wine and spices. I don't quite get that either; I assume you don't do the wine because you're about to make kiddush anyway, and you don't want to bless the same wine twice. But why leave out the spices? And with the fire, Screwy thought that you say "the lights of the fire" over the festival candles themselves, rather than lighting a havdalah candle. Dad thought you should light the havdalah candle and then not extinguish it, because as soon as you lit it it would be chag, but I'm not sure that's right, I have it in my head that you can extinguish on chag even if you can't light.

In terms of food, it makes sense that you're supposed to clear out the chametz by lunch time (or halachic midday, or something) on Friday, and then not eat any chametz over Shabbat. Fine. But does that mean you eat breadless meals with no motzi, even on Shabbat itself? Or is there some workround I haven't thought of?

Today was the bar mitzvah of the first of this year's crop of pupils. I found myself nearly as nervous as I was at my own bat mitzvah, but in fact everything went perfectly. The star of the occasion did very well and more importantly enjoyed himself; this is a guy who at the beginning of the course had no Hebrew and was unsure he could cope with standing up in front of everybody without falling apart due to stage fright. So I'm particularly proud of him; he's worked very hard, and compensated for some SEN issues, and you can just see him fighting with grim determination against the biological forces that want to turn a 13-year-old boy into a monster.

I gave a sermon on the concept of holiness and how that relates to this week's Torah portion; it was a little bit stream of consciousness, but seemed to go down well. Thanks to hatam_soferet and Screwy for providing input when I was working out what to say.

Doing that kind of thing uses up my entire day's quotient of energy; I came home to collapse for a couple of hours before going out again, and made myself a desperately needed pot of tea, and promptly put it down with its centre of gravity over the edge of the table. So I smashed my good teapot, and made a mess and didn't even get to drink the tea. (Fortunately I didn't spill much of the hot tea on myself, though scalded toes are a bit annoying.)

Then I had to go to the memorial event for my neighbour Alice. The idea was to have the kind of teaparty that Alice would have loved, gathering a bunch of her friends and neighbours (she made a point of getting to know every household in her street) to eat lots of cake and sing songs and make merry together. This we did, and it was a beautiful way to remember her life. But I didn't get home until quite late, and the clocks are going forward tonight, stealing an hour that I really need for preparing the lecture for Tuesday. So, sleep for me fairly soon.

Another trip to present the Stockholm Progressive group to a small provincial Jewish community yesterday, this time in Uppsala. It was a fairly exhausting evening, hard work but I think productive.

( itinerant preacher )

Since old Polish guys generally have less English than native Swedes, we were using a kind of muddle of English and Swedish (with some Russian and Yiddish thrown in for good measure and Polish for comic effect). There was much general encouragement for me to attempt Swedish, and since the group are almost all immigrants or children of immigrants, they were very firm in pointing out that I would never improve unless I got over my self-consciousness about my flawed speaking. So I was managing mostly in Swedish, even with several people talking at once about quite complex topics. I had to fumble for vocab a few times, but I was certainly communicating. So when it came to drawing the group together to make grace after the meal, I staunchly carried on and made the announcement in Swedish. So that's the first time I've done that, actually made a public speech (albeit a fairly short one) to an audience in Swedish rather than just one-to-one conversation. That feels like a big step forward!

I actually had a fun weekend in many ways, even though I was knocked sideways by hearing the bad news about Alice in the middle of it. The death of a friendly acquaintance last week is hardly the sort of news that requires cancelling everything, but enjoying myself while feeling really tearful was a slightly odd experience.

( social whirl )

Today I looked after my cells, and played with the microscope a bit, which I always enjoy. And took things easy enough to spend some of the time chatting to various people. Life is good.

I want to do a sort of moral maze type discussion with my class next week. Does anyone have any suggestions for scenarios that could get 12-year-olds thinking about moral dilemmas? A mixture of secular ones and religious ones is probably good, so I welcome suggestions from people who aren't Jewish.

...making myself useful to the Jewish community. Bar Mitzvah teaching continues to go well, and my pupils enjoy challenging me with difficult questions. (How do you as an English Jew feel about the British Mandate in Palestine? Um, you may be mature enough to ask that question, but I don't think I can answer it at a level that would be meaningful to a 12-year-old...) I am quite pleased that I managed to convey the idea that there are conflicting just claims on the land. The kids from an American background tend to be gung-ho pro-Israel and think the Palestinians are evil fanatical terrorists etc etc, whereas the kids from a Swedish background have been brought up with the idea that Israel is an oppressive colonialist power. So I think everybody came away from class with a more nuanced view.

The most unreasonable question came from someone old enough to be my grandmother, though, when I was leading a discussion of last week's Torah portion. I was talking about the idea of shabbat and asking whether we could work out from textual evidence whether the Patriarchs were aware of shabbat, or whether it was a new idea introduced to the children of Israel as they came out of Egypt. And this woman took it into her head to ask me who told God to rest on the seventh day... I was all, look, the traditional idea of God is as the unique originator of everything, by definition there's nobody who tells God what to do. But she wasn't satisfied with that, she seemed philosophically unable to cope with the idea that God could exist if there was no other being that created God. So I tried a little elementary Kabbalah on her, which I don't think she found entirely satisfying (partly because it's a bit hard to explain mysticism off the cuff like that). It ended up with her getting into a tearful row with a younger (but still adult) woman, because the latter was personally upset by the idea of someone asking the question of where does God come from. *sigh*

I organized to have a meeting with the mother of my pupil whose ceremony is scheduled first, in order to plan the practical details. She told me to wait at a certain bus stop a short walk from her house (and incidentally absolutely miles away on the other side of town), and she would come and pick me up. But then she went and forgot that we were supposed to be having this meeting, and turned her mobile phone off. I waited for 40 minutes (and it was a pretty cold night), and then gave up and got back on the bus to return home, at which point the mother called me in a panic. Because I am too nice, and because I didn't want the faff of rearranging the meeting, I turned round again and had the meeting, by this time over an hour later than we originally planned. It was a good meeting. It can be quite awkward to be caught between a parent and an adolescent who have conflicting views about how a bar mitzvah should work, but in this case the boy in question was exceptionally mature about it and negotiation happened and the conclusion satisfied everybody.

There was also the secret Talmud study cabal, where we were talking about house leprosy and why bad things happen to good people (because if your wicked neighbour gets punished with house leprosy then your party wall is still going to have to be torn down even if you are a totally wonderful person). I made what I thought was a really obvious point about the irony of Miriam criticizing Moses for marrying a black woman and being punished by being turned snow white with leprosy, and everybody acted like this was the most amazing chiddush. And I got to give an intelligent answer to a question about why menstrual impurity still counts while other kinds of impurity don't and how it all relates to Torah scrolls. Because knowing hatam_soferet is very useful!

Then I went to a meeting of community educators, one that has been postponed several times since November. They want to do something about the sorry state of bar mitzvah education in the main part of the community, and were trying to get some advice from those who have experience of what does work. It was quite nice in a lot of ways. There were four Orthodox tutors and me, and I think they were expecting me to be flaky, whereas in fact we all had very similar ideas about how good BM education should work, not to mention that I have more experience and currently rather more pupils than any of them. So that was good propaganda for the Progressive group, and good for my Swedish besides. It was hard to stop the discussion from getting derailed into "why the Conservative community isn't working as it should", because of course this is at the root of the problem of why the education offered by this sector of the community isn't working as it should. There was an awkward moment where the only other woman started talking about how it's important to teach girls girl stuff like how to make challah and how to have a Jewish life outside the synagogue context, and she sort of wanted me on her side. But I had to tell her that by her definition I'm a man, I am much more use at teaching Torah than baking challah, and I contribute to the community by leading services and doing education, not by making a beautiful Jewish home.

And next week I have a ton of committee meetings and I seem to have been roped into helping out with day Limmud in the autumn, which is going to mean even more committee meetings. Hey ho.

( the randomized album cover meme )

After a somewhat frustrating week work-wise, I came into a round of chanukah events.

( lots of celebrations )

The same moon which ends Ramadan this year is the moon that ends the absolutely hectic month of Tishri. It's also the first approximation of a weekend I've had since I got back to Sweden. I haven't made the best use of it; I didn't really get going with my domestic chores yesterday, and today I've mostly spent curled up on a sofa drinking ginger tea and reading LJ. I'm being gentle with myself because did I ever need a break!

( reasons why you haven't heard much from me for the last several weeks )

Still not caught up with my reports from my summer holiday, and not even slightly with the book reviews, and I've only made the smallest of dents in my email and communication backlog. I think my life is going to be a bit more manageable in the next couple of weeks, though.

During the week of Succot, I was covering my head, mostly with a small, Israeli style "knitted kippah". Mostly Swedish people are too polite to react openly to unusual dress, but I had some interesting interactions with foreigners as a result:

( What's that weird thing on your head? )

I feel I've been doing Jewish stuff constantly since I got back to Sweden: ( diary summary for the past several weeks )

It's also been a lot of fun and highly social, so I'm not really complaining. But I have basically had no time at home or online, except what I can steal from sleeping time (as I am doing now). So if you were expecting to hear from me and haven't, that's why. I've barely been fitting work around all this, so the few days I might theoretically have had free evenings I've mostly ended up working late. My conclusion is that I don't know why people refer to "bitter" Cheshvan; right now, nothing sounds more delightful than a whole month free of festivals!

Chag sameach to those who still have the energy for just one more celebration!

My friends list is full of posts by people who don't feel ready for Yom Kippur. I can very much add my voice to that chorus. If I were feeling homiletic, I could ask whether one can ever be ready. But the truth is all I can do is come back to the Yehuda Amichai poem I taught last week:

The smoke rising from the convent of the silent nuns
Is all I have to say.
This year winter will come late
When we're ready for its coming
And we won't be.

I'm tired. And curse the three Great Religions
Which won't let me sleep at night
What with bells and howls of muezzins and loud shofars and noisy atonements.
Oh God, close your houses, let the world rest.
Why hast thou not forsaken me?...

I don't feel in the least spiritual, but that's by far the most common state of affairs for me. I suppose I am only noticing it now because it contrasts with how deeply I'm involved in community stuff and ritual, which makes me feel somewhat hypocritical. I've been telling everybody else about the importance of repentance and not doing a lot about it myself.

Anyway. There are only a couple of people east of me, so I hope I'm in time to wish everybody an easy fast and a good conclusion.

I've been really heartened by reading some of the RH posts on my flist, particularly kassrachel's and adrian_turtle's. So I thought I might add mine, cos it's been fun.

( yes, I have spent all of the last three days doing Jewish stuff )

I did not manage to connect with pocketnovel, which is a shame. But that's probably my fault for being disorganized about getting in touch with her.

Reasons for watching it: I wanted to watch a Jewish film with my bar mitzvah class, and this was the only vaguely appropriate one available. One of the class had recommended it, and I think she was right to do so.

Circumstances of watching it: There were various logistical problems with organizing this film showing. In the end, I managed to join the synagogue library, which turned out to have a much poorer selection than I'd remembered. In fact, almost everything falls into the two categories I was trying to avoid, either Holocaust stuff or faky Yiddish nostalgia crap. The Producers and The Believer I suspect are too old for 12-year-olds, especially as they don't have that good a grasp of modern Jewish history. Very few of your recommendations were available, sadly. I considered Annie Hall but decided that Woody Allen annoys me too much, and the theme sounded like it would not be very interesting to pre-teens.

In the end I picked up The summer of Aviya, which is Holocaust-related but set in the 50s and dealing with a Survivor getting on with her life. I have a vague memory of seeing it at about the age my pupils are now, and it's based on a YA book so it seemed likely to be well pitched.

Then there was trouble about where we were going to watch the film. We'd hoped to watch in one of the pupils' homes, but didn't manage to organize that. Luckily, the Jewish Centre has a youth room, with comfy sofas, a computer, a Playstation, a small handful of books and board games and a huge wide-screen TV, and we were allowed to borrow this room for the evening. But when we settled down to watch The summer of Aviya, it started jamming and skipping about ten minutes in. One of the youth workers who was floating around lent us Livet i 8 bitar instead.

Verdict: Livet i 8 bitar is rather high-grade fluff.

( detailed review )

The copy we had had no subtitles available, so I'm quite proud of my ability to follow the dialogue in variously accented Swedish! It wasn't quite the positive rounding off of the term that I had hoped for; the film came to and end and everyone just drifted off. But never mind. One of the pupils gave me a bunch of flowers, which made me feel like a real teacher. And on the way home I visited the Stockholm food fair which is going on at the moment, and ate a nice snack meal at the booth belonging to the Ethiopian restaurant. Mm, injera.

The last few days have been a manic social whirl.

( finally catching up )

Because of all this, I managed to miss both darcydodo's birthday, and my fourth LJ-versary. So belated happy birthday to Darcy, and I may do the retrospective of four years on LJ a few days late.

Finally, a very warm welcome to the wonderful hobbitz, a dear friend from Oxford whom I've been trying to tempt onto LJ for years. Her journal is friends only and she only wants to friend people who actually know her. But I'm so very happy that she's finally here.

Now I fall over. Splat.

I've been vaguely planning this post since I led the Progressive service on March 10^th (!) Since then I've done various other bits and pieces of running services, doing the egal minyan with ploni_bat_ploni, and then today helping out with the Progressive service again.

( babbling about this role at length )

A while ago, the Jewish community offered me a position which carries some amount of prestige but is a huge time commitment. I politely declined, for exactly that reason. Next thing I know, I'm being publicly congratulated on my new appointment.

Gaaaaah. It's not that I absolutely hate the idea of having this job, and I appreciate that it's the first time in the synagogue's history that they have appointed a female gabbai. But it's very sneaky and underhand to corner me into accepting a job I'd already turned down, by springing it on me in public. The reason I said I couldn't do it is that I already have a lot of Jewish community related commitments, and specifically because I really do not want to be obliged to show up to shul a few minutes before the start of the service every Friday evening and Saturday morning. I do go to services most Fridays and Saturdays anyway, but sometimes I'm a little late, and sometimes I have a non-Jewish guest I don't want to abandon, and sometimes I want to take a whole weekend to travel, and sometimes I just need a flipping break!

Of course it had to happen this week, when I'm already stressed about getting too many responsibilities piled on me. When I had Jewish-related commitments Saturday, Monday morning, Monday evening, Tuesday morning, Thursday morning, Thursday evening, Friday all day, and next Saturday as well, not to mention some of the preparation and admin for this stuff that needs to be done during the week but not at a fixed time. This level of crazy is the exception, not the rule, but even so.

Yes, I'm up past my bedtime yet again, but I needed to vent about this.