Our Seder was a smashing success. Highlights included Kit asking "Why is this night different?" and then immediately pointing to Hannah's partner and saying "Logan!" (it's true, having him over for dinner does make tonight different!), X and Logan deciding that Elijah is in such a hurry to visit all the houses that he doesn't have time to go to the bathroom, Hannah reminding us all not to lick our pinky fingers after we dipped out wine for the plagues, J carefully putting on an apron to protect his nice shirt while he was cooking and then forgetting to take it off before sitting down to dinner, Kit finding the afikoman at the exact right point in the Seder by pure coincidence (they were wandering around playing with their dolls and spotted it), and me singing "Mi Chamocha" to the tune of "The Wellerman".

X: Do you pee behind bushes like Elijah?
K, scornfully: I pee in the toilet!
R: Invite gentiles to your Seder, they said! It'll be fine, they said!

Kit was really good for the whole evening, delighted to have extra people to play with and reasonably engaged by the pictures in the haggadah even when they didn't much care about the story we were telling. They ignored most of what was on the symbol plate, though they did suck all the salt water off the parsley leaf before rejecting the parsley itself, but they went to town on the matzo ball soup—a far cry from last year.

Our cooking plan went perfectly, and of course we made far too much food. The symbol plates were generously laden, and we went through the service so fast that we hadn't had time to get really hungry, so we had matzo ball* soup with my homemade stock—so damn good, never doing it any other way ever again—and GF matzo balls and meticulously slivered celery and carrots, and then had no room for actual dinner. We decided to take a break and do a round of clean-up to buy ourselves some digestion time. My grandparents had a tradition of Elijah bringing gifts of knowledge, a.k.a. books, to all the kids, and of course I'm happy to continue that tradition, so Kit was well entertained by a collection of Daniel Tiger bedtime stories while the rest of us bustled around.

* Why do I want to spell it "matzah" when I'm talking about the flat cracker form but "matzo ball" for the soup form? Transliteration habits are so weird.

Once the table was cleared and reset, each of us managed a small bowl of lamb or chicken stew and a couple of pieces of chocolate and a nibble of afikoman, and then we called it quits. Kit skipped the stew and just had chocolate; apparently the going exchange rate is 1 afikoman = 1 piece of chocolate-dipped marzipan. We'd meant to steam asparagus, but there was no time and we couldn't have eaten a bite of it anyway. It'll keep for tomorrow, or whenever we're able to think about food again.

For the last few weeks I've been shifting to lower-carb eating and smaller portions, so I'm super extra stuffed and feel no guilt whatsoever. It was a most excellent feast.

Kit often finds it hard to listen to people singing, but when I put them to bed, they let me very quietly sing "Eliyahu HaNavi" while rocking them and listening to the rain, just like in their delightful More Than Enough picture book (from which this post's subject line is taken). It was a very good end to the evening.

As for the omer count, I'm thinking of folding a little origami flower every night, and stringing them into a garland when I'm done. My room needs more decoration and it feels like a nice way to celebrate the growing season.

I finally woke up early for 9 a.m. Torah study! The student rabbi sent out such cool texts for Parashat Vayikra and I was excited!

What I have learned from this is that waking up early sucks, trying to interact with people and be emotionally and intellectually present after waking up early sucks even more, Zoom is the worst possible way to do Torah study, and I should not attempt this again.

Oh well.

And here we are.

( My takeaways from week six )

( Week Seven: Malchut and Shechina - Immanence, Manifestation, Divine Presence, Inspiration, Awe )

At the end of seven weeks, you have done whatever you could do in seven weeks. It both was and was not enough.

The 50th day is the festival. Jewish holidays tend to be a mix of the somber and the uplifting, and Election Day will undoubtedly be both those things. Vote, if you can and you haven't already; help others vote; and as the polls close and the results trickle in, take care of yourself and your loved ones. Remember that on any day, whenever you need to, you can start counting again, building your own pattern and your own habit and your own way of getting from where you are to where you will be.

Thank you so much for joining me on this journey. It's been genuinely therapeutic and invigorating for me, and I hope for you as well. <3

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.