Livre d'Or

So I've made it to 5777, and successfully led the Rosh haShana services. Attendance was quite low; we had I think 8 people for the evening and just barely enough for a minyan on the day.

I led ma`ariv on the first day at Grassroots Jews; we had nineteen people as opposed to almost ten times that number the following morning. I said at the end that was the last service I was leading over yomtov, but ended up leading another two!

R' Miriam Berger, who was in youth movement with me, has written a really inspiring and heart-breaking sermon about refugees, including a really powerful midrashic tradition she had from R' Edward Feld about shofar that I didn't know previously: Teruah [is] the sound in the cry of Sisera’s mother. As she stood at the window in the realisation that he was not going to return she sobbed for her son and therefore the Teruah is the constantly broken note like her uncontrollable crying.

What a coincidence; I've just learned that this year.

I very much share R' Janes' view of what it was like to grow up in the optimistic time of the 90s and to feel that our world has become a worse place since then.

I've been saying that for years: The world might not have been a better place, but (unless you lived in former Yugoslavia or Rwanda) everything was becoming better; the only bad thing was the music.

I can't believe what's happening to my country these days. It's like I've fallen into an alternate universe. I was so proud of Britain for its long-entrenched democratic values; one reason I said I wanted to keep my British citizenship was because they aren't so entrenched here in Germany. But then I thought the Netherlands was a paragon of democracy too. Britain, it seems, is only following a few years behind it and much of the rest of Europe.

I suppose I should have paid more attention to the Milgrom and Zimbardo experiments; all it takes is the slightest hint of economic instability and every country turns in on itself and on the other. :-(