Last year, Rabbi Miriam asked us to think of a phrase or idea to carry into the year, and the words "Help me let go" came into my head and proved to be very useful through the year. Now I'm seeking a touchstone for 5781. I decided to let the Rosh Hashanah liturgy speak to me, and what stuck in my head wasn't actually from the holiday liturgy but from the Ahavat Olam, a prayer said at every evening service.

Ahavat olam beit Yisrael am'cha ahavta;
Torah umitzvot, chukim umishpatim otanu limadta.

Our machzor, Mishkan T'filah, translates this poetically, and it's the translation that caught my eye:

Love beyond all space and time—
Your love enfolds Your people, Yisrael.
We receive it in your teaching:
Your gift of Torah, sacred obligations, discipline, and law.

This struck me as a very specifically Jewish way of understanding divine love, and having spent the last four years in an increasingly lawless country, I'm particularly attuned to the idea that law is a sacred gift.

I missed the omer count, and was delighted to find the sefirat ha'binyan; now that's over, I need a new nightly ritual. Out of curiosity, I counted seven weeks from Rosh Hashanah to see what I would find. On the Hebrew calendar, nothing. On the secular calendar, November 5th.

Which is not so far from November 3rd.

So I'm adapting this practice for the weeks leading up to Election Day, still working with the kabbalistic traits of divinity associated with the omer count, but interpreting them through the lens of "Torah, sacred obligations, discipline, and law" as expressions of divine love. Call it sefirat ha'mishpatim, counting and working toward a government that enacts and obeys just laws.

I'm putting together daily practices based on the divine attributes associated with the omer count, working somewhat from R' Yael Levy's lovely mindfulness-focused omer count guide Journey Through the Wilderness. Anyone who wants to join me in this is welcome to. I'm also including suggested readings for some of the days and I'd love links to other readings that feel topical.

Since tonight is already day six, I'll be playing catch-up a bit, but I really didn't want to leave out the week of lovingkindness, compassion, and generosity. Chesed is the beginning of all activism for me. I defined it once as "the love that's like God's love", the love that's less personal and more social and even impartial. Taking time to ground myself in chesed gives my activism strength and purpose.

( Week One: Chesed - Generosity, Love, Compassion )

At the end of this week, you should have a list of three candidates or organizations to support, at least one social change action that you feel you can do consistently and sustainably, and a little grounding in love and compassion for yourself, your community, and the world. Next week is gevurah, the week of strength, judgment, and discernment, and the outward-facing work begins.

(I didn't mean for this Shabbat's parsha post to turn into shitposting just in time for Faffing February or whatever it is. It just, uh, happened.)

I finally caught up on my Torah reading. This week's parsha is Terumah, which explains how to build the tabernacle, the portable temple intended to be carried around the desert until the proper permanent one could be built.

Exodus 26:14: "And make for the tent a covering of tanned ram skins, and a covering of dolphin skins above."

me: o.O I was not expecting that.

So I did some digging. I learned that there are dolphins in the Mediterranean, which I had not known, so the idea of dolphin skins being among the treasures the Israelites "borrowed" from their Egyptian neighbors is not actually all that weird, despite my immediate reaction of "they're in a desert!". I also learned that the original word there is tachashim, plural of tachash, and no one has any idea what the fuck it means.

Some other proposed translations:

* leather that's dyed blue
* leather adorned with faience beads
* badger
* ermine
* unicorn

The only thing most people can agree on is that it came from a clean animal, because the idea of putting skins of an unclean animal on the Tabernacle is abhorrent (though I will note that dolphins are not kosher, so whoever picked that translation seems to have discarded this qualification), and it was probably either blue or multicolored. (This piece goes into great detail about the various arguments in favor of one reading or another, and comes down in favor of the beaded leather interpretation.)

The dolphin idea apparently comes from a 19th-century scholar who noticed that Arabic for porpoise is tuchash, and suggested the two words were cognates. That's not a bad theory, as theories go. Probably more likely than the unicorn.

While reading various writings on this, I found this commentary in Midrash Tanchuma:

R. Nehemiah contended that it was a miraculous creature [Hashem] created for that precise moment, and that it disappeared immediately thereafter from earth. Why is it called orot tahashim ("sealskins," lit. "skins of tahashim")? Because the verse states: The length of each curtain shall be thirty cubits (Exod. 26:8). What known animal could supply enough skin for a curtain of thirty cubits?

Thirty cubits is 45 feet long. That is pretty big! Especially for a porpoise-like, blue-skinned, possibly one-horned or long-necked animal...

At that point I started researching what fossils have been found in that region. After all, like most deserts, it was once an ocean.

My conclusion is that Hashem, whose presence extends throughout spacetime and to whom billions of years are as a day, dragged a poor confused plesiosaur out of the Cretaceous and dropped it at the foot of Mount Sinai, where it was turned into curtains.

I'm glad I could solve this 3,000-year-old mystery for everyone.

I was going to call this "how not to make a pumpkin pie" but that title is taken, so I stole a phrase from that story--which is wonderful, and you should all go read it--for my subject line instead.

Tonight's gluten-free dairy-free pumpkin pie recipe:

0) Assemble all ingredients. Preheat oven.

1) Put dough ingredients in freezer to chill.

2) Make filling. Taste filling. Make a face like this:



Determine that the store-brand tinned pumpkin had soaked up too much metal flavor from the tin. Regretfully throw out the filling. Turn off the oven.

3) Go out to dinner. While out, buy organic pumpkin in a box (not a tin).

4) Assemble all ingredients. Preheat oven to 450F.

5) Make filling. Taste filling. Approve.

6) Attempt to make dough even though the coconut oil has now frozen entirely solid. Manage it with the help of the trusty Cuisinart food processor.

7) Grease the pie plate with a bit more coconut oil, since yesterday's quiche (made with the same dough recipe) stuck to it a little. Roll out the dough. Attempt to neatly transfer the dough to the plate. Mostly succeed. Patch up the holes.

8) Pour the filling into the plate. Put it in the oven. Set timer for 15 minutes, after which you intend to reduce the heat.

9) Notice that smoke is filling the kitchen. Quickly determine that the coconut oil used to grease the pie plate bubbled over the edge and is now burning on the floor of the oven.

10) Shake baking soda over the oil and see whether that does any good. Learn what burning baking soda smells like. (Spoiler: terrible.)

11) Remove pie from oven. Turn oven off. Start toaster oven heating at 350F, since it was more or less 15 minutes. Give up all hope of the custard setting properly. When the toaster oven has heated, put the pie in the toaster oven--on top of a foil-lined baking sheet, since you are capable of learning.

12) Clean the oven floor.

13) Timer goes off. Pie is not remotely done. Heat the oven to 350F and confirm that there is no more smoke. Put the pie in the oven. Belatedly remember to turn the toaster oven off.

14) Ten minutes later: pie not done, according to a toothpick, although the top is dark brown. Also bubbly, in a fizzy-tiny-bubbles sort of way. You have no idea why.

15) Ten minutes after that: declare the pie as done as it's going to get. Put it on the windowsill to cool. The filling almost immediately breaks away from the crust. Of course.

16) Chase the cat off the windowsill. "Trust me, kitty," you say, "you don't want this pie. Probably no one wants this pie."

17) After a suitable amount of time, cut into the pie. The filling resembles Indian pudding autumn pudding in taste, texture, and color; it has the classic curdled consistency of a broken custard. The crust is soggy and mealy on the bottom and overcooked around the edge. A puddle of coconut oil rapidly fills the gap left by the "slice" of pie.

18) Decide to put the pie in the fridge, mostly for a sense of closure. Lift it up and discover that the cork trivet is glued to the bottom of the pie by coconut oil. Reach for paper towels and realize you never replaced them after using up the roll cleaning the oven. Get more paper towels. Wipe off the bottom of the pie plate, put a sheet of paper towel in the fridge, and put the pie in the fridge.

19) Write up a version of the recipe that you think will actually work. Vow to try it... tomorrow.

20) Go to bed.