Let It Snow
It snowed in Jerusalem today, but if you blinked you missed it.
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You can’t make this stuff up
The kangaroo answers to the name of Itzik
You Can’t Start Too Young
Me to Ellat (aged 7) planning to lead up to “the Beit Yosef’s Question” to see how she handles it: Tell me why there are eight days of Chanukkah. Ellat totally short-circuiting me: Because when the Jews restored the temple, it took them eight days. Me trying to get back to what I hoped was […]
Whumping the Willow
The Hoshana Rabba service (or, as my Siddur puts it, The Seventh Day of Tabernacles, Called Hosha-gnana The Great) is something of an omnium gatherum of Jewish liturgy — apart from counting the omer and a megilla reading it has just about everything. Extended pesukei de-zimra, ya’aleh veyavo, shaking the lulav, Hallel, Torah reading, Mussaf, […]
Experimenting in the kitchen
On a sudden whim last Shabbat I decided to make kugel, which I have never done before. I don’t know if it’s from local patriotism or just that I like the taste of pepper, but for me the only kugel worthy of the name is Kugel Yerushalmi, so after a little googling1 I tried this […]
Othar Never Blowed No Shofar
…but tomorrow אי״ה I will. A Happy New Year to you all.
Here’s hoping
It made me smile to read this today, because I was watching the 10th anniversary special edition DVD of The Shawshank Redemption just last weekend. One of the things the producer mentioned in the special features was that in the original cut the movie ended with the scene of Red sitting on an intercity bus, […]
You have 2109 new messages, all marked urgent
Back home and online after three weeks+ abroad. A lot has been happening, and there’s lots to do now we’re back. I’ll try to update gradually. If you emailed me and are waiting for a reply, your patience will soon be rewarded.
שבתא דסיפרא
I realized much too late that the last two posts have the wrong title. It’s actually called Hebrew Book Week, (שבוע הספר העברי), not Jewish Book Week. Neither title is really totally appropriate. There are lots of Hebrew books on sale that aren’t in any way Jewish, in fact my impression is that about 75% […]
Jewish Book Week II
Thanks to Hagahot, I picked up the bargain of my life today: the Magnes Press facsimile edition of Gershom Scholem’s own copy of the Zohar. According to the introduction Scholem bought this Zohar in 1915 when he was 17, and it never left his desk for the rest of his life. At some point when […]
Jewish Book Week
I stopped by the Jewish Book Week on the way home. It’s the first day, so I’m still comparing prices and looking at titles and haven’t bought anything yet. One title really made my mind boggle: חכמי טרנסילבניה, The Sages of Transylvania. I wonder what they were studying. I didn’t open it, because I thought […]
Filling up
I try to avoid filling up with petrol on a Friday morning. There’s a universal custom at filling stations here that anyone who buys more than a certain amount of petrol gets a free paper. Since the Friday paper is much larger than on the other days of the week, and costs more, most of […]
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry
…when I read this comment by Ozzie on Hirhurim: Once went to a housing fair in Israel. Went to a Chareidi booth and I was not wearing a hat or jacket, my wife was in a tichel and denim skirt. We were told immediately that the development was only for chareidim. I pointed out to […]
How to Hold a Lag Ba‘omer Bonfire
…or, “More things that Israelis do and nobody can explain the reasons for” Drive to a parking lot about 500 meters from your house. It will be full to overflowing, but you can always double park in the access road. Set up your bonfire 10 yards down-wind from somebody else’s. At intervals during the evening, […]
Five things about books
Blog meme time (thanks to Talmida). Total number of books I’ve owned. No idea. How do you count? Do multi-volume sets count as 1 or the number of volumes? I have a lot of those. The total is certainly more than 1,000, probably less than 10,000 Last book I bought. A dead heat between Travels […]
For calendar geeks 2
One of the unusual features in this year’s Jewish calendar is that the first day of Pesach is Sunday, so Seder will be on Saturday night. This is actually not as unusual as everybody thinks — it would be more accurate to say that any other day of the week when Pesach falls is unusually […]
I am a feminist
There are advantages to living in a small country. If I was in America or even England and saw that someone whose work I admire and whose blog I read regularly was speaking somewhere, chances are it would be 1,000s of miles away and I wouldn’t be able to get to it. In Israel, on […]
The voices in my head
I hadn’t been planning on learning Daf Yomi this cycle. I’ve had good intentions many times before, and got right through Berachot once, but sticking to routines is not one of my strong points, and seven and a half years is about 50 times longer than I usually manage to do anything before wandering off […]
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree
Aviad, describing himself on an school application form: “If the religious were red and the secular were yellow, I would be orange.”
eek
Fatherhood is all about learning to handling new experiences, and here’s one I haven’t had before. What should a father do when he sees his daughter spread over a Jewlicious post singing the praises of “hot frum girls“? My own first answer was “load his shotgun.”