Snatches of joy
Oct. 2nd, 2018 09:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livI didn't do Succot very well this year. I often don't, but it was even more than usually squeezed between the High Holy Days and a big community Shabbaton I'm helping to organize with my old community in Stockholm.
I helped with a Succot activity for the Sunday School kids, ending with decorating the succah which was great fun. But didn't go to shul on the actual festival because I was running low on days I could take off work. One of the things I prioritized was to attend a stone setting during chol hamoed (the middle days of the festival). Apart from my brain doing the awful thing of: oh, it'll be nice to see [the deceased couple], I haven't seen them for a whi... argh, no! I am glad I took a day to do that. And the last of my late grandmother's nonagenarian circle died the same day, when of course the entire community was busy with the stone setting, so we ended up postponing her funeral until after Shabbat and the end of the festival. The only time I actually managed to fulfil the obligation to sit in the succah was at the reception after that stone setting.
I'd planned to try to get to shul the middle Shabbat of the festival, butghoti_mhic_uait noticed that there was a really cool exhibition about to finish that weekend, so we went to that before it closed. It was at the Jewish Museum, which I was surprised to find does in fact open on Shabbat, and about the life and work of the cartoonist Goscinny, most famous for the Astérix books, who, it turns out, was Jewish. I hadn't been to the Jewish Museum since it moved to a dedicated space, and it is a very good museum.
Andreas wanted to run around following whatever seemed interesting, which is normally fine, I don't mind visiting museums non-systematically, but in this case it was a bit awkward because we particularly wanted to see the Goscinny exhibition before it closed. And also because at some point he ran into the Holocaust gallery; I think the contents went mostly over his head, but his older sister is more literate and more historically aware. Actually the thing he got scared of was an old, elaborate ark, because the Judaica objects are displayed in a dimly lit gallery to preserve old materials, and he became convinced that the ark was a sarcophagus and when I said, no, it's just for keeping scrolls, that didn't help because he associates scrolls with creepiness too. But we did in fact manage to learn about Goscinny, and generally it was a successful visit. Though in explaining the hamsa symbol, I might have accidentally convinced the children that it actually is a charm against dark magic, which was not quite what I meant to say. We also got see the Queer Lens portraits, which they've kept on display past the end of the main exhibition.
We were slightly rushed returning to Cambridge because I'd booked tickets for an evening concert withcjwatson. Which was not quite ideal as a romantic date since it turned out my parents were also attending the same concert. But it was lovely, absolutely OTT romantic cheese including Sheherezade, which I adore, and a very good guest violin soloist.
Then Sunday evening was Simchat Torah. We ran it as an hour of children's activities (in place of the usual Sunday school), which worked very well because most children actually stayed for the service. I made a multi-part puzzle hunt for the 8-10 age group (solve simple clues to identify things that were created; find the answers to the clues in a wordsearch; physically find envelopes hidden about the room labelled with the days of creation; look in the envelopes for the appropriate days to find the Hebrew names of all the created things; find the Hebrew words in a Hebrew wordsearch; listen out for the new vocabulary during the Torah reading.) And then I was warden for the logistically complicated service, which went smoothly but not too smoothly. We had a lot of fun, especially with so many young people there. Since I last spent ST there, my synagogue's repertoire has expanded to include the frog dance as a regular feature, and a more or less English style country dance with longways sets, top couple gallop down and back up, then cast to the bottom and make an arch which the whole set dances through. Which is slightly hilarious when it's two eight-year-olds making an arch for six foot+ adults to dance through while carrying Torah scrolls...
The day of ST itself we had a work away day which I felt I probably couldn't get out of. But it was more relaxing than being at work, we spent the day in a very gorgeous meeting room in one of the Cambridge colleges, being fed every hour or so with all kinds of delicacies, and doing a bit of blue sky thinking about the direction of the department. So not very festivalish, but very pleasant. It's a lot like my childhood fantasy of what being an academic is like, sitting in a beautiful room discussing interesting ideas with clever people.
Somewhere in there I managed to have a really good relationship conversation with one of my partners, and although it doesn't sound much like it, I did find some time to relax and recover from the big festivals. October is shaping up to be very busy also, but generally in a good way.
I helped with a Succot activity for the Sunday School kids, ending with decorating the succah which was great fun. But didn't go to shul on the actual festival because I was running low on days I could take off work. One of the things I prioritized was to attend a stone setting during chol hamoed (the middle days of the festival). Apart from my brain doing the awful thing of: oh, it'll be nice to see [the deceased couple], I haven't seen them for a whi... argh, no! I am glad I took a day to do that. And the last of my late grandmother's nonagenarian circle died the same day, when of course the entire community was busy with the stone setting, so we ended up postponing her funeral until after Shabbat and the end of the festival. The only time I actually managed to fulfil the obligation to sit in the succah was at the reception after that stone setting.
I'd planned to try to get to shul the middle Shabbat of the festival, but
ghoti_mhic_uait noticed that there was a really cool exhibition about to finish that weekend, so we went to that before it closed. It was at the Jewish Museum, which I was surprised to find does in fact open on Shabbat, and about the life and work of the cartoonist Goscinny, most famous for the Astérix books, who, it turns out, was Jewish. I hadn't been to the Jewish Museum since it moved to a dedicated space, and it is a very good museum. Andreas wanted to run around following whatever seemed interesting, which is normally fine, I don't mind visiting museums non-systematically, but in this case it was a bit awkward because we particularly wanted to see the Goscinny exhibition before it closed. And also because at some point he ran into the Holocaust gallery; I think the contents went mostly over his head, but his older sister is more literate and more historically aware. Actually the thing he got scared of was an old, elaborate ark, because the Judaica objects are displayed in a dimly lit gallery to preserve old materials, and he became convinced that the ark was a sarcophagus and when I said, no, it's just for keeping scrolls, that didn't help because he associates scrolls with creepiness too. But we did in fact manage to learn about Goscinny, and generally it was a successful visit. Though in explaining the hamsa symbol, I might have accidentally convinced the children that it actually is a charm against dark magic, which was not quite what I meant to say. We also got see the Queer Lens portraits, which they've kept on display past the end of the main exhibition.
We were slightly rushed returning to Cambridge because I'd booked tickets for an evening concert with
cjwatson. Which was not quite ideal as a romantic date since it turned out my parents were also attending the same concert. But it was lovely, absolutely OTT romantic cheese including Sheherezade, which I adore, and a very good guest violin soloist. Then Sunday evening was Simchat Torah. We ran it as an hour of children's activities (in place of the usual Sunday school), which worked very well because most children actually stayed for the service. I made a multi-part puzzle hunt for the 8-10 age group (solve simple clues to identify things that were created; find the answers to the clues in a wordsearch; physically find envelopes hidden about the room labelled with the days of creation; look in the envelopes for the appropriate days to find the Hebrew names of all the created things; find the Hebrew words in a Hebrew wordsearch; listen out for the new vocabulary during the Torah reading.) And then I was warden for the logistically complicated service, which went smoothly but not too smoothly. We had a lot of fun, especially with so many young people there. Since I last spent ST there, my synagogue's repertoire has expanded to include the frog dance as a regular feature, and a more or less English style country dance with longways sets, top couple gallop down and back up, then cast to the bottom and make an arch which the whole set dances through. Which is slightly hilarious when it's two eight-year-olds making an arch for six foot+ adults to dance through while carrying Torah scrolls...
The day of ST itself we had a work away day which I felt I probably couldn't get out of. But it was more relaxing than being at work, we spent the day in a very gorgeous meeting room in one of the Cambridge colleges, being fed every hour or so with all kinds of delicacies, and doing a bit of blue sky thinking about the direction of the department. So not very festivalish, but very pleasant. It's a lot like my childhood fantasy of what being an academic is like, sitting in a beautiful room discussing interesting ideas with clever people.
Somewhere in there I managed to have a really good relationship conversation with one of my partners, and although it doesn't sound much like it, I did find some time to relax and recover from the big festivals. October is shaping up to be very busy also, but generally in a good way.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-10-03 01:07 pm (UTC)Since I last spent ST there, my synagogue's repertoire has expanded to include the frog dance as a regular feature, and a more or less English style country dance with longways sets, top couple gallop down and back up, then cast to the bottom and make an arch which the whole set dances through. Which is slightly hilarious when it's two eight-year-olds making an arch for six foot+ adults to dance through while carrying Torah scrolls...
I've heard this called a "Virginia reel," when done in Michigan without Torah scrolls. Though when I actually did it in Virginia, on Simchat Torah last year, they called it "the goat dance." Go figure. It was somewhat less hilarious than yours, because the people holding scrolls stood on the sidelines and sang for that part of the festivities. They also had an established custom that pairs who could not reach all the way up and across for a large enough arch would just not connect at the top. This made things somewhat less hilarious with children, but generally more courteous with dancers in wheelchairs.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-10-03 09:14 pm (UTC)Good point about wheelchair dancing. Tiny children trying to make an arch is funny, but adults who happen to be seated is just excluding. The one wheelchair user at our service sat out the goat dance, and I hope that was conserving energy rather than feeling excluded by the arch thing.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-10-04 03:44 pm (UTC)