Meeting notes!

For your entertainment and my need to catalogue every thing that happens during my meetings with the rabbi ... here is a brief entry of "Things I Learned While Talking to the Rabbi." Enjoy!

A short note: Gematria is sort of the number-izing of the Torah. Each letter corresponds with a number, Aleph is One, Bet is Two, Gimel is Three, and so on until you get to Yod, which is 10, and then you bump up to 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, etc. so that the enter alphabet corresponds with a number, much like roman numerals. The rabbis take words with similar sum totals among their letters to show interesting and sometimes marvelous things. I posted one of these nifty things using the gematria of "chametz" and "blemish" not too long ago. I recently heard of gematria referred to as fascinating, but "impractical rabbinics." I dig that. 


And now, here we go!

• The reason Haredim and Hasidim and whomever else does (or maybe doesn't) abide by the rule of not getting your matzo wet on Pesach is because of the fear that there might be some leftover flower that didn't make the cut in the matzo and by getting it went you'd start the process of leavening and if you happened to drip some H20 on something and didn't eat it for 18 minutes it might become chametz! Oy! So I asked the rabbi if the 18-minute time limit for something to go from un-chametz to chametz having anything to do with 18 being the gematria for the word for life -- chai (חי) -- but he said no. Anyone know otherwise? The flour would, technically, come to life. An interesting tradition, but I like my matzo with cream cheese and jelly too much to go that route. 
• Tradition has it that when you sleep, this is 1/60 of death. When you dream, it is 1/60 of prophecy. I sure spend a lot of time prophesying. I mean, really. Every night. Vivid dreams aplenty.
• In the Passover Seder, there are four sons. One of the sons -- perhaps one of the most controversial at that -- is the Wicked Son. It's ordered that you knock out the teeth (more or less) of the wicked son. So why do you do this? Well, the gematria for wicked son is 570. The gematria for teeth is 366. If you knock out the teeth from wicked son, you come up with 204, which happens to be the gematria for a tzadik, a wise man. Sometimes gematria makes me go "yeah, right, okay" and sometimes it makes my jaw drop and forces me to go buy books on gematria and bible codes ... 
• There are THREE types of handwashing. I didn't know this, and I didn't know that I was doing the handwashing on Shabbos before the motzi WRONG. Yes, I have been living a lie for a long, long time now and I didn't know it. What are the three types of handwashing?
• In the morning, when you rise, you say the modeh/modah ani and you wash your hands with al natilat yada'im. The way you wash is to fill up the cup, and pour it on the right, then the left, then the right, then the left, then the right, and finally the left. Three times on each hand, alternating.
• In the pre-motzi washing, you say al natilat yada'im, but you fill up the cup and throw water on your right hand twice, then on your left hand twice. Curses! I was doing the morning washing routine before bread!!
• The third Pesach-centered hand washing is during the seder when you wash, and you only throw water on each hand once. I never got a really keen answer on why it was only once, but hey, it works. 

So, now, on my Amazon Wish List I will add two one stellar books related to my evening with the rabbi and others. [Unfortunately, one of the books is completely and totally in Hebrew (it's called Gematricon -- גימטריקון), so that won't be added.] The really interesting book is the Polychrome Historical Haggadah for Passover, which breaks down the traditional haggadah by when various portions of it were written/developed/etc. It color coats each period of when certain bits of the texts derived -- the early rabbis, the medieval period, etc. Fascinating stuff! Too bad actual copies appear to be in the $300+ range. Yikes!

At any rate, an early Shabbat Shalom to one and all!

A Seder Recap

Sigh. Chag Sameach friends and foes and bloggers.

So the boy and I headed up to Temple Sholom on Lake Shore for a first-night, community-wide young adult seder. Ian didn't stay because of outerlying factors, but I have some thoughts in general on the evening, because truth be told, the evening was a bust.

1) This was a young adult seder, aimed at people 22 to 40. There were 250 people signed up, and it was held in a gigantic room at the temple with tables seated for seven. It was open seating and ... there was NO MICROPHONE. Now, it started at 7:30 on a Monday. That means most people came straight from work or shortly thereafter. It's the beginning of the week. You don't have a microphone. People were RESTLESS. Talkative. Antsy. The rabbi was talkative, not loud enough, and this caused people to leave before the meal was even served. We hadn't even touched the second cup of wine when dozens got up and left. Why? It was 9:30 and we weren't anywhere close to dinner. Finally, the rabbi speeded it up and the evening ended around 10:30. A three-hour seder with a group of young adults? Most of whom likely were twice-a-year attenders? Ridiculous.

2) The haggadah (The Feast of Freedom edition) was ... well ... wordy. It's a great haggadah, and I've seen longer, but there was no transliteration. There was English and Hebrew, but NO transliteration. This meant about 10 people sang everything with the rabbi and the rest sort of hummed the tune. It isn't like services -- it happens once a year! Because it was a community-wide seder, there were Reform, Conservative, (Orthodox?), Conservadox, Reconstructionist -- you name it. A little help would have been STELLAR. It sucked to not be able to participate, because I could read the Hebrew quick enough. I mean, I can do it ... but not that quick, darn't!
See, there's the English on the left there and the Hebrew on the right ... but nothing else! I will admit that this haggadah WAS sort of nice because it had gleanings and explanations and insights on the margins of both pages to offer tidbits on what was going on. The weird thing, however, was that it sort of ... well ... skipped things. We never ate the egg. Well, our table did, anyhow.

3) Tables were doing their seders willy nilly. I sort of supported this, because it was going along so slowly and everyone was so hungry that it was almost necessary. The problem? Our table wasn't, so we were just hanging out as all the other tables noshed on matzo and charoset. I would have supported two large groups or tables to run their own. The shul I went to last year in Omaha did a great job with the large crowd ... but they had a mic. Then again, there was children there last year.

4) The dinner was not warm by the time we got it, unfortunately. The great thing about it was that there was this great matzo farfel kugel ... man. It tasted like bread pudding, really. Which was sort of a treat, of course. The rest of the food was pretty gross. Luckily, the gefilte fish was DELICIOUS with the horseradish. The charoset was pretty subpar, unfortunately. And we never got through the four cups of wine. Somewhere along the line, a few glasses just didn't appear in the haggadah. Sigh. A bust, really.

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So basically, by 10 p.m. after dinner, there were about 50 people left. I felt really bad for the rabbi (who seemed pretty young himself), but the way things were going, it was inevitable. There was a woman going from table to table around 9 p.m. asking for someone to go tell the rabbi to quit his yabbering. If anything, I felt bad for the rabbi. It made me think ... would I be willing to keep schlepping through it all in hopes of getting to a few people if I were a rabbi? I don't know, really.

I'll end my first-night Pesach seder rant by saying that I did have some great people at my table (a recent film student grad, three med students and a fellow who is a counselor on Birthright trips as well as works for a company that promotes Jewish environmentalism for youths ages 11-13). I got some info from the latter on a great Birthright program and from one of the med students I got an e-mail address. It was nice to meet some other Jews -- hoorah!

I don't know if I'll make it up to Temple Sholom for Passover services tomorrow morning. Maybe I'm a horrible person but something about the bust of an evening sort of makes me want to sleep (although that's what I did pretty much all day, ugh). Tomorrow I will, however, be making charoset. I'm pretty stoked -- considering it's my first time throwing it together.

I hope your seders managed to work out great. I wish I had another to go to tomorrow ... last year's seders were absolutely fantastic. Next year, there will be a seder at home. I want to make it work, and I will.

Shalom and laila tov.