Livre d'Or

...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 )

I've seen this meme / game floating around in various journals, I think I got it from

kate_nepveu. The plan is that you should comment and come up with a fictional character you associate with me. Can be any kind of fiction, not necessarily books, and I think the most interesting way to play is if you base it on personality rather than looks. If you're brave enough to play, I'll come up with a character for you in return.

( misc stuff )

I really need to sort things out for the sibs' visit, not to mention catching up on email and LJ. But hopefully I'll have a bit more time next week.

mistressdickens tagged me with a meme. I think that's the first time I've been mentioned by name for one of these in the more than 4 years I've been on LJ. My inner desperate teenager is disproportionately pleased!

( meme cut ) I've been feeling under the weather the last few days. Several migraines, painless at the time but afterwards they seem to leave me feeling headachey, tired and slightly nauseous. I really hope it's just my body protesting at the fast I put it through on Saturday, and nothing more serious. I'm not ill enough to be actually ill, but definitely sub-par.

Via

megamole, a cute meme: the game is to write a personals ad for yourself which is as unappealing as possible, without lying or making it obvious that you're trying to put people off. ( my attempt )

I have been quiet recently, mainly cos my Dad has been visiting and I've been spending time with him rather than online. It's been fun, with some really summery weather.

The main notable things I have done this week are: I attended a lecture by a guy who was wearing a kippah (and a very unconvincing mid-Omer beard) and broke off from his actual topic to clarify the difference between sex and gender. And today I ate lots of icecream at RS' farewell party.

What I haven't done is catching up with my huge backlog of LJ posts from before Pesach, nor have I processed all the photos I want to put online. Right now I'm feeling a little anhedonic, and knowing that it's just hormones doesn't do much to break the mood.

Oh, and I'm back on the eMusic bandwagon. Anyone want to recommend me any music that you're excited about right now? Also, if anyone's thinking of joining, let me know because if I refer you we both get 50 free tracks.

As a hold pattern until I have the motivation for a real post, here's that ( daemon meme everyone's been posting )

tattycat posted some really interesting questions in a locked post. So I'm going to propagate this meme because I enjoyed thinking about these questions. (The original title was "Owner's manual", and while I get the reference, the idea of being owned makes me twitchy, so I changed it.) The idea is that these are some guidelines about how to relate to me that someone in the process of getting to know me well might want to know. But I think they're interesting questions generally, even if you're not in that specific situation. I didn't know some of the answers when I first saw the meme, and I had to think about them.
( meme )

There's a meme going round where you have to quote Shakespeare. I don't know if it means actually quote from memory; if that's the case I'm rather at a loss, because although I know a fair amount of poetry by heart, very little of it is by Shakespeare. I could probably make a stab at Full fathom five... but I'd likely mess it up quite a lot.

So I'm going to assume you're allowed to go and look up some Shakespeare. And what I'm going to quote is Juliet's solliloquy from the opening of III.ii. Because I don't think I've seen this particular piece quoted anywhere I read, and because I connected to the eroticism of the words when I was too young to understand what actual sex was about. (Yes, I was late in catching on to all that, especially compared to Juliet herself, but hey!)

( Capulet's orchard. Enter Juliet )

The poetry meme has come round again. I missed it last time, but anyway.

This week I've been calling to mind a difficult time I went through, and how my friends looked after me at that time. PM sent me the poem I'm about to quote (and was otherwise comforting). And then NZ quoted it in a .sig when I was just thinking of it, so it obviously wants my attention.

It's not my favourite poem, and it's not an exceptionally good poem. But there's a reasonable chance people won't already know it, and it's a poem that is important to me:

A song of living
Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.
I have sent up my gladness on wings, to be lost in the blue of the sky.
I have run and leaped with the rain, I have taken the wind to my breast.
My cheek like a drowsy child to the face of the earth I have pressed.
Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.

I have kissed young Love on the lips, I have heard his song to the end.
I have struck my hand like a seal in the loyal hand of a friend.
I have known the peace of heaven, the comfort of work done well.
I have longed for death in the darkness and risen alive out of hell.
Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.

I give a share of my soul to the world where my course is run.
I know that another shall finish the task I must leave undone.
I know that no flower, nor flint was in vain on the path I trod.
As one looks on a face through a window, through life I have looked on God.
Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.
Amelia Josephine Burr, c 1919

I can't find Burr's dates anywhere; she was born in 1878 and didn't publish anything after the 30s. So I'm not actually sure whether or not this poem is still in copyright.

It's only recently I've been able to read that without risking unreasonable grief, and I'm finding it hard to say whether that's an improvement. But anyway. I love I have struck my hand like a seal in the loyal hand of a friend, never mind the associations it has for me, and never mind that it's in the context of rather sentimental Victorian Christianity.

Slightly mutated from

sciolist:

1) Go to my User Info page.
2) Pick one person on my friends list you're curious about.
3) Comment with their username.
4) I will tell you something about them.
5) If you like propagating memes, post this in your journal, see who is curious about whom.

Let's see if I can play this without offending anyone...

I have bought myself a copy of Renaud à Bobino. I basically never buy full-price new CDs, but it was only €15 including shipping. And it's not like 1980s French singers are readily available at my usual cheap music outlets. I love the internet, and I love Renaud's insane puns. (Who'd have thought that banlieue (suburb) sounds a bit like Bon Dieu (God)?)

I've been fiddling with my journal style to try and show friends colours. I finally got it working, which I'm sort of proud of because it involved messing with someone else's code. Of course, the moment I get the code to do what I want, the server with my stylesheets decides to fall down leaving my journal far more ugly than when I started. But hopefully this is a temporary thing.

I have been drinking a lot of raspberry flavoured stuff.

My lovely friend RB (formerly of Dundee J-soc) is around taking a holiday and visiting all his friends from Northern Region (which is the collective of Jewish students from North England and Scotland). He showed up yesterday afternoon, and I was really pleased to see him. (He had warned me that he was coming in an IM conversation weeks ago, but I'd forgotten.)

Anyway, we drank lots of tea and he told me about his job at the JLE. Apparently he's been learning lots of Gemara and also some Luzatto and (this one struck me as very cool) Judah HaLevi's Kuzari! And organizing murder mystery parties suitable for a certain type of frum people who object to plotlines involving extramarital affairs, or actresses with revealing costumes. I am pleased to report that he's picked up a lot of Jewish learning and secular admin experience, but remains very much himself and has not been subsumed by the mildly scary JLE mindset.

And finally, an extremely random meme from

jacquic: ( meme )

I just got a significant chunk of work eaten by a BSOD, so I'm consoling myself by making a silly post before I redo the bloody thing. I think I'm going to have a hard time with this meme, because several of the weirder things I've done in my life I've done in the company of various people on my flist. Anyway, it might tell some people something they didn't know about me.
( 10 things )
Right, back to that figure, I think.

redbird poses the following question:
Look around you right now and name 3 things you can see in the room you're in that make you smile/happy, even if it is just the tiniest little bit!
And this seems a good question to answer, so...

( three things )

rysmiel posted a meme about explaining one's unique entries in the interests section. So here's my version, cos I'm displacing.

chevruta: Traditional Jewish approach to text study, where you work with a partner and basically argue until you get some personal meaning out of whatever you're reading. It's a very effective way to understand a subject (I've found that a chevruta-type approach works for a wide range of things other than Jewish texts), and at best it can be incredibly intimate and exhilarating. My first boyfriend had been my chevra for a while before we got together, and as far as I was concerned sex had nothing on chevruta in the intimacy stakes.

I don't know anything else that comes close to good chevruta in terms of sheer fun (though obviously that's a matter of personal taste), and mediocre chevruta is also analogous to sex in that it's better than none. I had some really good chevruta going in Oxford, with various combinations of Old A, J and new A and occasional others. (Hey, let's drop the metaphor now before this gets dodgy, hmm?) And I miss it tremendously. At the moment I'm getting by on the occasional session with RB or preparing a supposed shiur for Prof S which isn't quite the same, but at least it's something.

Everett Fox: The coolest Biblical translator I've ever come across. Sadly he's only up to Samuel so far, but his translation is absolutely amazing. It's incredibly close to the Hebrew, to the extent that he makes subtle textual allusions and assonnances transparent, but his English is very readable. It's not exactly standard English, but it's poetic and inspiring rather than clumsy. His amazing translation is published by Schocken Books, and it's totally changed my life. (He also acted as the religious adviser for Prince of Egypt, which is how the obscure Jewish mythological references got in there...)

GB Edwards: The author of one of my favourite books of all time, unfortunately terribly obscure. Edwards was a sort of recluse from Guernsey, but was also an autodidact and spent some time as a professor of English in an English university. He was absolutely miserable and regretted ever leaving Guernsey, so he wrote a sort of alternate history autobiography about his alter ego who didn't. The first volume of this is The Book of Ebenezer le Page; it took him about 40 years to write and he died with the remaining two volumes only in note form. It's an amazing piece of social history, describing Guernsey over the whole span of the 20th century, and it has a cast of characters like nothing else I've ever read. I shall post a proper review of it at some point.

Jewish-Christian dialogue: I've been deeply involved in Jewish-Christian dialogue since I was a young teenager; now I'm branching out into more general interfaith work, but Jewish-Christian will always be my first love. At least partly because I know Judaism and Christianity far better than any other religions, so it's easier to get into a profound level.

Through dialogue, I've met some of my dearest friends, and learnt an amazing amount about myself and maybe even the nature of truth. I also think it's a worthwhile enterprise in terms of promoting goodwill and multiculturalism and all those other sorts of things. It's perfectly possible to be cynical about it, and indeed, sometimes it's little more than mutual congratulation by liberals being fluffy at eachother. But I honestly believe that in some circumstances it can be a genuine force for social change.

Microphotography: Taking (artistic) photos of microscopic things, particularly cells, in my case.

When I first checked with the intention of writing this post, I had BBC micros and Weizmann Institute as unique interests, but it turns out that other users were interested in BBC computers and Weizmann, so I've altered mine to match. And there is one other lj user who is interested in p53 (my professional speciality, which deserves a post in its own right, but this isn't going to be it).

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