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RIP Tim Curry. I have read so many articles, new and old, following his death, about how The Rocky Horror Picture Show was so formative for so many people for the whole of its 50 year run. So many isolated Queer people who found their people at the screenings, so many who discovered new gender possibilities that were barely visible anywhere else beyond this one amazing piece of art that broke all the rules.

I want to tell you that I saw RHPS in the wrong circumstances, and all it did was terrify me. But it's not the show's fault, it's everything else about the society I grew up in. ( stuff from my childhood )

Don't have a conclusion, really, just reading a lot of the very well deserved praise of the late Tim Curry's oeuvre is rather strongly casting me back to this disturbing moment when I was a kid. I don't think that today's 12yos should be "protected" by even more censorship and keeping them away from any hint of sexuality other than men and women getting married in order to make babies. Rather the opposite, they should have the context to be able to understand transgressive art. And they should feel safe to talk to adults if they do accidentally see something that they're too young to process properly.

Moooooood scared

So I had a kind of ludicrous college assignment to spend all of the past academic year working on a single verse of Torah, with some restrictions on what we were allowed to pick so it couldn't be one of the really famous ones. And I managed to get invited to give a sermon last week, when the Torah portion we read included my verse.

Just to sneak in under the wire while it's still the right week for it, here is my 2000 word summary of a year of intense academic work.

Moooooood accomplished

Recently read

Cyteen, by CJ Cherryh. (c) CJ Cherryh 1988, Pub 1995 Warner Books, ISBN 978-0-446-67167-9
He, she and it, by Marge Piercy. (c) Marge Piercy 1991, Pub Del Rey 2016, ISBN 9781473529724

Back to back rereads of two feminist SF classics from 35 years ago. I didn't quite intend to put them together but there might be something in the juxtaposition. I picked Cyteen as my homework book, because I'd been meaning to reread it and I reckoned it was dense and thinky enough to have something to say about it. And then the same prof picked He, she and it as the intro book for a new theological SF reading group she's starting.

( Cyteen )

( He, she and it )

Anyway, this reminds me that you should read

mrissa's excellent piece on rereading!

Currently reading

A little history of mathematics by Snezana Lawrence. Snezana is a member of my community and I asked for this as a Chanukah present. I've been kind of dipping into it rather than reading it cover to cover, but it's so much better than all the popular maths books I was devouring as a teenager. Firstly it doesn't assume that maths was invented in Classical Greece and then nothing happened until Newton and Leibniz (except maybe there were some exotic oriental types who invented the word 'algebra'). It looks at maths from a definitely European perspective, but is still interested in what was going on elsewhere in the world whether or not Europeans were aware of the advances at the time. It has women in it other than Hypatia. I mean she was cool, but she was not the only female mathematician in history.

There probably isn't a perfectly goldilocks amount of maths in a popular maths book, but I think aLHoM strikes a good balance of explaining mathematical insights and advances without making the reader go through all the equations or geometric diagrams step by step to be able to understand things. It also has the most gorgeous chapter headings, woodcuts drawn by Kat Flint, and a really lively narrative style that makes historical figures seem real.
Breaking Binaries by R Elli Tikvah Sarah. I have a kind of complicated history with R Elli but we had a really profound conversation earlier in the summer, and also their latest book has a chapter about people who are neither fully Jewish nor fully outside the community, which is probably what I want to work on for my final thesis. I think of R Elli as primarily an activist; they were a key figure in the fight for same-sex marriage in the early 1990s. I'd sort of forgotten that they're an incredibly lucid interpreter of the Bible, and I'm getting a lot out of the book even before I get to the Beyond the Jew / Non-Jew Binary chapter.

Moooooood relaxed

cjwatson and I have just finished watching through S1 of The Owl House. Very, very slowly because we rarely have time to watch TV coinciding with times when the rest of the household aren't also trying to watch TV. I liked it a lot!

( The Owl House )

Now I have a couple of months with a bit of free time, I've been playing some of the computer games I optimistically saved for such an eventuality. ( a few games )

In physical games we got invited over to a friend's specifically to play Mycelia. NB there are way too many games with that title but I mean the 2024 game by JJ Neville. First impression: it's one of the best and most original semi-abstracts I've played in a while. I would say up there with Wingspan, and similar in that it has cards with beautiful art of real-world mushrooms. It has some great territory control mechanics involving spores and building networks, as well as card collecting. And just lovely components, really pretty with mushroomy colours and squiggly almost knot-work style art and nice wooden meeples and triangle tiles.

Moooooood relaxed

So next/this year I'm assigned to Wimbledon, a kind of apprenticeship or internship where hopefully I will learn how to actually do the job of a rabbi as a whole, rather than individual pieces of it. They have asked me to write an article introducing myself for their magazine. And I'm really struggling to write something not boring; what I have reads like a list of the places I've lived, worked and volunteered with the Jewish community, like a very pedestrian covering letter. So, if you were a member of a synagogue and there was a new intern about to join, what would you want to know about them? I've included the (slightly redacted) draft below the cut.

( this is boring even to me and I'm the subject )

One of my next year teachers has set us for our pre-class homework over the summer "read a book". Like, literally pick up a book and read it. Presumably there's a point to this, I was planning to read some books anyway, but I assume there's more to it than just ticking the box to say, yup, I read a book. Suggestions welcome! If an eminent professor of Bible told you to read a book, what would you pick? I know the prof is an SF fan, she's trying to start a theological SF reading group.

Moooooood blocked

~~Recently~~ er past several months read:

A guide for the perplexed, by Dara Horn, Pub 2014 WW Norton & Co, ISBN 978-0393348880
The long way to a small angry planet, by Becky Chambers, (c) Becky Chambers 2014, Pub 2015 Hodder & Stoughton, ISBN 978-1-473-61981-4
Twilight Robbery, by Frances Hardinge, Pub 2018 Macmillan Children's Books, ISBN 978-1509842346

( A guide for the perplexed )

( The long way to a small angry planet )

( Twilight Robbery )

Via

cosmolinguist, I thoroughly recommend An interactive introduction to the terrific experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt by Khaled Hosny, who at 23 1/2 is a terrifyingly brilliant writer. Even if you think you are not interested in Arabic typography, it is 8000 words of the most stunning prose I've seen in a long time.

Moooooood hot
Whereaboooouts Hendon, NW London

Not quite my first full day off since March but not far off it either. I aten't dead but I have badly run out of time for keeping in touch with people. Anyway the headline is, I have sort of finished my third year of rabbinic training although like every year there's this weird limbo between the end of teaching in mid-May and the actual end of the year first week in July.

( new experiences in the past several months )

Coming up: I'm going to two conferences this month, one for the newly formed Progressive Movement (combining two previous small denominations) and one international but held in London. (I'm glad Covid levels are actually low for the first time in 5 years, but I would have attended anyway, these are going to be the best networking opportunities ever.) The usual fortnight of random extra classes after the end of the main part of term has been condensed to three days because of the conferences, bracketed by the viva talk of our sole ordinand and then her actual ordination ceremony.

Further on into the summer I'm being helpful Jewish person for a long-running Jewish-Christian forum in Germany. And starting what will be my fourth year placement at Wimbledon Reform. In contrast to the first three years when I was here, there and everywhere, most of fourth year I'm going to be attached to that one community, so it's more like I'm a kind of assistant minister and less just showing up and leading services or teaching one-off classes. I'll miss the variety but it's clearly very relevant to actually practise doing a rabbi-type job.

Do I have a life outside Rab School? Sort of, but it's mostly quite domestic, spending time with my partners when I can. I've just had a couple of days visiting my MiL and getting my first sunburn of the year walking in the Malverns. I've managed to visit

angelofthenorth once, and occasionally get my act together to drink tea with

hatam_soferet, but other than that totally failed to see any of my friends or even email or call them.

Moooooood tired

There's been a rant I have been meaning to turn into an essay for a while, but Ken White (Popehat) has done it better, so I direct you to his really well-written and referenced (though US-centric) article: The Fashionable Notion of 'Free Speech Culture' Is Justifying State Censorship, Ironically. Criticism. Is. Not. Censorship, and “Free speech culture” has a natural tendency to discount the speech rights and interests of people who criticize speech.

This is important in Europe too, not just in the US, because it's a deliberate, specific Russian infowar tactic to promote far right events at UK universities and claim censorship if anyone objects. A network based at [Cambridge] University and backed by Thiel, which it said was using the issue of free speech to “normalise white nationalism on UK campuses”. Neither Putin nor Thiel has anyone's freedom at heart, and they're all too successful at distracting people with a toddler-like notion of "freedom" where you get to say the naughty words without being told off.

( shorter version of my original opinion, building on White's piece )

I want to talk about the education privilege meme that's been doing the rounds. On the one hand I love old-school memes that encourage lots of cool people on my d-roll to talk about their experiences growing up. But at the same time, I'm kind of frowning at this particular iteration.

( thinky thoughts )

Anyway, hopefully this is an adequate substitute for the meme and you don't need me to tell you in detail how absurdly precocious I was in reading and maths.

Moooooood cynical

My mother died in March. That feels like basically the only thing that happened this year, but of course it's not. Theoretically you stay in full mourning for a parent for a whole year (which hasn't ended yet); I haven't quite managed that, as done properly it's really quite intense, no social gatherings or live music for example, but it has definitely been the major theme in my life. And helping Dad to figure out what his life will be like as a widow.

I continued to be a student rabbi, making it through to the halfway point of my studies. I took on more and more complex rabbinic work, and got to know the incoming first year students. (We're the grownups now, there is actually only one finalist ahead of my cohort.) My much awaited and also somewhat dreaded trip to Israel got cancelled, due to the decision point coinciding with the particularly scary time when Israel was actively at war with Iran. I did some other short travel, even making it to Germany and Sweden.

Significant events:

Mum went from being officially terminally ill but mostly coping at the beginning of the year, to the drugs not working and being in a lot of pain in January-February, to actively dying. March-April was all the immediate aftermath of her death.
I had a few days with jack in Skegness, which I remember basically nothing about because it was in the middle of the final weeks of Mum's life. I think we stayed in a cute tiny house and did a bit of walking in the countryside. I have more memories of our trip to Norfolk in May.
I spent a very intense and overwhelming week in Germany at an Abrahamic faith retreat.
doseybat and verazea got married on a lightship on the Thames, and my partners had a Jewish blessing of their 20-year-old marriage, both on the same weekend.
I did a completely absurd amount of travelling for the High Holy Days, first day Rosh HaShanah in Southampton, second day in the Isle of Wight accompanied by the intrepid cjwatson, Shabbat Shuva in Stoke, Yom Kippur in Cornwall where I had to respond to the first fatal antisemitic attack in this country in my lifetime, Succot back home in Cambridge, a very flying visit to Sweden for the Shabbat during Succot with ghoti_mhic_uait, and back for Simchat Torah and returning to college.

( other wrap-ups )

Previous versions: [2004] [2005] [2006] [2007] [2008] [2009] [2010] [2011] [2012] [2013] [2014] [2017] [2018] [2019] [2020] [2021] [2022] [2023][2024] Amazingly this is my 19th review of the year; I've been going since 2004 but there were a couple of years in the middle I missed out.

Tuuuuuune Nine Inch Nails (feat Judeline): Who wants to live forever

Content note: mentions antisemitic murders and police violence. I personally am completely safe, I'm only talking about dealing with news.

It's around midday Yom Kippur. I'm leading the morning service with a tiny community in the southwest corner of England. There's a slight hiatus as this congregation only have two Torah scrolls, so we have to roll through from the first reading in Exodus to the second reading in Leviticus, saving the second scroll for the afternoon reading from Deuteronomy. (In this community, like most of the Progressive world, our second reading is Leviticus 19, not the verses that are sometimes used as clobber texts to support homophobia.) While there's milling about, the volunteers running the tech for Zoom approach me at the bimah and let me know that there has been an attack in a synagogue in Manchester.

( reactions ) Also, I am deeply grateful for the kind people who checked in with me personally when they heard the news, and for all the leaders, Muslim, Christian and civic, who sent messages of support to the Jewish community and continue to be in solidarity with us.

Moooooood scared
Tuuuuuune Avinu Malkenu

One advantage of my unexpected free month was that I started reading books again. Not a lot but 6 complete novels and a longfic in 6 weeks, which is more than I have for years. Let me catch up with some brief reviews:

Since term properly, properly finished on 6 July, I have read:

Circe by Madeline Miller 2018, Pub 2018 Bloomsbury, ISBN 9781526612519
Coconut Unlimited by Nikesh Shukla (c) Nikesh Shukla 2010, Pub 2010 Quartet, ISBN 978-0-7043-7204-7
Will Super Villains be on the final? by Naomi Novik, illustrated by Yishan Li (c) Temeraire LLC 2011, Pub 2011 Del Rey, ISBN 978-0-345-51656-5
Some desperate glory by Emily Tesh (c) Emily Tesh 2023, Pub 2023 Orbit, ISBN 978-0-356-51718-6
Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie (c) Ann Leckie 2015, Pub 2015 Orbit, ISBN 978-0-356-50242-7
A free man of color by Barbara Hambly (c) Barbara Hambly 1997, Pub 1998 Bantam, ISBN 0-553-57526-0
I transmigrated into Cordelia Naismith! by Lanna Michaels, 2025

( Circe )

( Coconut Unlimited )

( Will Super Villains be on the final? )

( Some desperate glory )

( Ancillary Mercy )

( A Free Man of Color )

( I transmigrated into Cordelia Naismith! )

Moooooood content

This weekend one of my oldest friends got married, and my partners celebrated their 20^th anniversary with a Jewish blessing and wedding canopy. So I had a lovely lovely time, and also I'm very much reminded that there's a crowd of (mostly somewhat connected) people I've been friends with for most of 30 years and I should make more active effort to actually spend time with them because they are awesome.

( wedding squee )

I sort of want to see if I can make it to my brother's charity's ceilidh next week. But Friday evening events in Brighton when I have a bar mitzvah in Cambridge on Saturday are a bit unworkable. And although I enjoyed the dancing, what I want more of isn't mainly dancing, it's spending time with people. And waiting for my friends to have reunions in the form of weddings isn't very efficient! I'm amazed that there were even two weddings this year, with most of my circle being in our 40s.

jack has planned a bank holiday picnic next Monday; it will be fully outdoors, which is good for infection risk but possibly bad for enduring summer weather. But if you happen to be in Cambridge you're most welcome.

Moooooood joyful
Whereaboooouts Trinity Buoy Wharf, London, UK
Tuuuuuune Praise the Lord, ye heavens adore him

This week P'tite Soeur organized a family trip to London. All four siblings and Dad, which is quite a feat of logistics even if we didn't manage to also include partners.

( London )

Another thing I was able to do due to not being in Israel was to visit the community I'll be spending Yom Kippur with, the amazing Kehillat Kernow, a peripatetic community covering most of the Cornwall peninsula. (Yes, that's me in the news article at the top of their website, they are very prompt at reporting!) The long train journey was not as wonderful as I had hoped, because the trains were very very overcrowded in peak season, but at least I had a seat and got to enjoy the lovely views. And read a bunch of novels, which is definitely making my brain happier.

They invited me to dinner Friday evening, and had a very Liv conversation about dealing with racism in education and medicine, with the other guests having direct professional expertise, not just setting the world to rights. And put me up in a super nice hotel in a neo-gothic pile that used to be a convent, and were gracious enough to invite me to stay Saturday night as well so I even got a little bit of time in Truro, which is where they held this particular service. I walked along the river a bit, I found a teeny-tiny Pride festival in the town centre, but it was packing up by the time I had finished dinner at 7 pm, so I wasn't able to get dessert from one of the sparkly rainbow doughnut stands.

In between I lead a Shabbat service, with very enthusiastic participation from the community, and they even appreciated my somewhat political sermon about whether we can still be Zionists in this moment. Because it was the new moon of Av, I got to read from their super-exciting Historic scroll. Well, actually I chanted the verses about the creation of the sun and moon; it's still a big deal for me to do that in public. I'm pretty pleased with how all that went.

And now I'm back and I have another month of relatively uncrowded schedule. It's very nice.

Moooooood cheerful
Whereaboooouts Kensington, London, UK

It's been a full and emotional couple of months, friends. The main thing to report is that I was supposed to be in Israel as of a week ago, but Israel bombed Iran and Iran retaliated and the go/no-go date for my summer programme was right in the middle of the 11 days when Israel was in full lockdown due to lots of missile attacks, so they really had to cancel it. I have a whoooooole lot of emotions and thoughts about this, and I also have an unexpected summer month with almost no commitments.

( rab student life in interesting times )

I will fully admit that I'm glad I didn't end up getting on a flight two days later. Intellectually it goes without saying that I would far rather Israel was in fact safe enough for me to be there, and that it had been consistently obvious it would be over the past couple of months. But personally, I am absolutely delighted to be at home. And have a chance to see my family and do fun summer things like go to concerts and have picnic dates and sort out practical things that I've let slip with the intensity of everything since Mum got sick. I even managed to overlap in London with

redbird and her partners this week, which was an unexpected and wonderful bonus. Among many chill, non-urgent summer plans I am hoping to be a bit more present here.

Moooooood relieved

I missed my anniversary of moving to DW – this has been my online home since 3 May 2009, a slightly astonishing 16 years. Anyway, the

3weeks4dreamwidth annual fest is ongoing, and I am not doing any particular posting challenges or anything, but I generally think having more content here is good. Some people don't agree, they really dislike those times in early January and April-May when everybody makes resolutions to post more and the site gets busy. I'm kind of a hypocrite because I love when people commit to posting more frequently or regularly, but I never really do so myself.

But talking about random things when I happen to have time and brain is also useful! Inspired by a discussion in

agonyaunt I was interested in people's thoughts about playing board games including both adults and children. ( experiences and questions )

Please tell me what you think! Did you play with your caregivers as a child, and if applicable do you play with the kids in your life now? What works to have a calm, enjoyable game when there is a big difference in skill levels?

Moooooood content

As posted under lock, my mother died on 11 March. ( the past couple of months )

My next big thing is that college are insisting we absolutely have to spend the summer in Israel. I don't want to, mainly because I don't think it's ethical, partly because I'm not convinced it's safe, and a small amount because I just don't want to be away from my people for several weeks, especially not far enough away that the only way to get home is several hours' flight. After much soul-searching I've come to the conclusion that I don't want to burn the amount of goodwill it would take to refuse to go. So I'm going to spend a few weeks studying at the pluralist yeshiva, Pardes. I think the actual studying will be great, even if I don't want to be there.

If you want to tell me I'm a horrible person for allowing myself to be pressured into going, well, you're probably right. If you want to be helpful, please recommend me good resources for working on my modern Hebrew over the next couple of months. I know about Duolingo and will probably put in a little bit of graft there, but ideally I want to listen to and read Hebrew media. At the moment I'm putting on Kan Bet (Hebrew language talk radio, I think more or less equivalent to Radio 4) in the background, and it is definitely helping with immersion, but I could do with something more interesting, basically. Indie radio or podcasts or a series or something. My language skills are at a rather awkward level; I am not a beginner and my strong classical Hebrew helps quite a lot, but I can't exactly follow spoken Hebrew at natural pace, I can sometimes get the gist depending on the topic and the accent of the speaker. So I think that means I'm at a level where I will get better with just lots of exposure, but any more structured recommendations would be welcome.

Moooooood sad

My extremely awesome girlfriend managed to get us tickets for the stage production of Ballet Shoes, a book we both imprinted on. Which meant we actually managed to do the thing I'm always hoping for of a proper date-date Friday night on a weekend when I'm doing community work Saturday.

( review and weekend notes )

Anyway, we managed to catch the last show of the run, but apparently there is going to be a reprise later in the year, so if this review makes you want to see it you still have a chance!

The reason it made sense to go to the theatre was that Saturday I was working at Mosaic Liberal in North London. ( student rabbi dealing with responses to Gaza )

Moooooood pleased
Whereaboooouts 1930s London

I was very interested in Jude Doyle's TERFs, Trans Mascs and Two Steve Feminism, and even more so in

sbqr's thinky response.

( read the essays by the experts first, but my thoughts fwiw )

On a related note, I very much resonated with this piece by

kiya: Better Days Were On Their Way, as well as the linked Grace Petrie anthem, about the specific brain damage that comes of having been in high school in the 90s I have a very different experience of gender from

kiya and in a different continent at that, but I think we must be very close to the same age. So we were for the most part alone, and we knew to be afraid. I knew zero out gay people at school, and almost none in my wider circles. A couple of friends tried to come out to me and I didn't respond well because I didn't understand their necessarily coded language, so probably they thought I was basically more or less straight and cis and likely dangerous with it.

I definitely don't want to presume, but maybe this is an avenue of solidarity with trans men: a partially shared experience of being perceived as cis girls in a world where it was not only dangerous to be anything at all other than straight and binary gendered, but almost impossible to imagine anything else. Which is not at all to say that I think trans men are actually women, that would be a really offensively wrong opinion. But maybe we have in common the same danger and the same deliberately engineered ignorance affected people from lots of different genders and sexualities and backgrounds.

Moooooood pensive

I read and was very impressed by this review by

lannamichaels. And I mentioned it to

jack who proceeded to buy me the book for my birthday. And really, Finn and Ezra's bar mitzvah time loop is just as delightful as

lannamichaels says.

( detailed review )

So I'm glad this book exists, and I'm glad that DW allowed me to find out that it exists, and I'm glad that we live in a future where you can pay money for the internet to send you books.

Moooooood pleased

Livre d'Or

Not sheepish, but individ-ewe-al

RHPS

Sermon: Ki Teitzei 5786

Reading Wednesday 26/8

Media and games

Help me with my homework?

Reading Wednesday 24/6

Rab school life

Freedom of speech

Education privilege

Year in review 2025

Yom Kippur

Reading not-Wednesday 23/8

Weddings

Excursions

Not in Israel

DW-versary and board games

State of the Liv

Theatre: Ballet Shoes

Interesting essays about gender margins

The internet is for uniting readers with books

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