Interfaith
Apr. 17th, 2022 01:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livSo I disappeared for two months, sorry about that. Mostly I'm just tired, and all my energy is going to an increasingly desperate struggle to avoid plague when both the government and my employers would prefer if everybody just gets sick repeatedly. I have also been taking steps towards massive life changes, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to continue cryptic about progress in that direction until I can officially make a public announcement.
Anyway, I wanted to tell you about this weekend, which is of course the start of Pesach and also Easter. Happy festivals to Jewish and Christian peeps. It's also the middle of Ramadan, and people are getting excited about the confluence of all three, though I think it's not that surprising since Easter and Pesach are supposed to coincide (even we don't quite make it every year), and Ramadan lasts a whole month so lots of things overlap with Ramadan. But in my personal life, this confluence means I spent Friday night at a Seder with my family of origin (but couldn't invite most of my family of choice because it was Good Friday for them), and yesterday evening at an interfaith iftar event, and today I am going to OSOs for Easter dinner.
We had a long discussion among the family about whether we could manage in person Seder this year. We really wanted to do it; until 2020 we always, always gathered for first night of Pesach regardless of where we were in the world or what else was going on in our lives. But cases are very high indeed, and a meal lasting many hours with lots of talking and singing feels almost certain to lead to Covid transmission; we just had to rely on hoping none of us had it. We all obtained permission from our respective bubbles and decided we'd go ahead. In the event, my dad got a positive test just far enough ahead of the festival that he was clear by this week, and my sister was unluckier with the timing and was still positive by yesterday. Both had only mild symptoms and seem to have come through, but P'tite Soeur and her partner ended up joining on Zoom after all. So it was parents, three of the four sibs,jack, Thuggish Poet's partner, and H, a refugee who lived with my parents for some months until his immigration status was sorted out. Absolutely tiny by our usual standards, but also a huge and momentous gathering by the standards of the past couple of years.
One advantage of Pesach coinciding with Easter is that it's easy for me to take plenty of time off work to do the Pesach prep. So this year's cleaning was relatively unstressful, especially since I wasn't also preparing a Seder meal at the same time.jack was amazingly supportive and we actually had the whole kitchen thoroughly sorted out within half an hour of the deadline on Friday. We basically gave up on cleaning the rest of the house, partly because I'm trying to maintain a distinction between dirt and actual chametz, and partly because plague means we're unlikely to want to invite any Jewish guests who might have higher standards of kashrut than me.
So Friday afternoon we went over to my parents' and returned to our well-established routine of preparing the meal. It's harder without P'tite Soeur, who has professional chef experience and is brilliant at planning, delegating tasks and keeping everybody calm, but Screwy did a pretty excellent job for an amateur, andjack is pretty much in the routine now after more than a decade of family Seders. It was difficult to convince Mum to scale back, cooking for 8 rather than our standard of 3X that many, but we managed to restrain ourselves to the tune of only one soup, two mains, two desserts plus fresh strawbs, and a modest number of side dishes. Menu was a cut down version of our usual, because nobody was in the mood to break with tradition in such a topsy-turvy year.
We also debated whether we should replace the salt water of the first dipping with sugar water, to represent the trans-Atlantic slave trade; we did not actually do so, but we talked about the pros and cons of altering the ceremony in that way. Our additional object this year was some chrain, which is a traditional food from my father's family made of a mix of horseradish and beetroot, which prompted us to think about Ukraine and their struggle for liberation. I think some people have been using beetroot as borsht comes from Ukraine, and others sunflower seeds. We also had some discussion about what it would take to initiate an armed uprising against the current government and whether that would improve things at all. My opinion is that it's very difficult to inspire people to revolution in the name of wanting stuff to be a bit less shit, but it's not like coming up with an extremist counter-ideology would help matters.
The after meal part ended up a bit rushed; it turns out that aiming for the last train at 11:45 wasn't quite late enough to fit everything in comfortably, even though we started before the halachically correct time of sunset.jack found the afikomen, and we exchanged books though not quite at the combinatorially excessive level of every person present gifting a book to every other person! I felt I'd done really well with a recent SF novel, The vanished birds by Simon Jimenez, and Between the world and me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a writer and thinker about race I have a great deal of regard for.
We had a very very chill day yesterday; I didn't get up in time even to make to Zoom services. In the evening, I went to the big new Mosque for an interfaith iftar event. This all came out slightly strange; I was invited out of the blue as a guest speaker, and nobody quite explained why I'd been selected. I was really worried about doing this kind of event during plague, but was assured that numbers were limited to maintain social distancing, and that people wouldn't be offended if I declined to join in the actual break-fast meal. In practice numbers were not limited at all; when I actually got there it turned out that "only one hundred invitations" meant a hundred people had been invited and told to bring all their family and friends, and that was in addition to the regular congregation, which during Ramadan is huge. Also, the event where I was giving the talk was much more integrated with iftar than I'd realized, which is my error of assumption, I was thinking I'd give a talk to a small, select audience and then head home before the crowds started arriving for iftar itself, but in fact everybody, including families with small children, was in the mosque for the full 3 hour event. I'm not sure I would have gone if I'd known it was going to be 20 times bigger than any indoor gathering I've dared to attend since pandemic, but I'm also not sure that the risk of several hundred people in a very large and airy space is significantly more than the risk of one hundred people.
The event itself was just wonderful. A sort of open mingling event with tours of the building for visitors, both local people curious about Islam and Muslims from outside Cambridge who'd made a sort of pilgrimage, if I can stretch the term, to celebrate in the amazing mosque. Everybody was really nice and friendly and excited to meet me. There were half a dozen short talks; I abbreviated what I'd planned to say about the importance of fasting in Judaism because it was clear they expected more like 3-5 minutes than 10. At sunset people broke their fast with a cup of water and a handful of dates, and then we went into evening prayer. The way one of the imams pronounced it made me very belatedly realize that maghreb is in fact cognate to maariv, I'd just failed to spot it for years due to the transliteration of 'ayn as gh. The service was amazingly dignified for a prayer session standing between the hordes and their dinner, not rushed even a little bit.
The actual iftar meal was highly organized, they had loads of marshalls politely directing people to pick up food boxes and head to spaces on the floor or at tables, depending on preference, to eat. Feeding hundreds of hungry people that efficiently with no jostling or queuing was an amazing feat of logistics. Since lots of people were eating outside, and the organizers pressed a meal box into my hands even though I'd said I wouldn't be able to stay for the meal, I did in fact join them to eat. Obviously it wasn't really KFP; I ate some rice with chickpeas (I eat legumes, kitniyot, during Pesach), and picked out the samosas and bhajis. Which might in fact be made with gram flour rather than wheat but I wasn't sure.
CCM is very very nearly my ideal place of worship. It's completely multi-denominational, not only in terms of formally defined Shia or Sunni, but also inclusive of Muslims from all over the world, with imams from Bosnia, Turkey and Pakistan and a very international outlook. And really integrated into the local community, and welcoming to all ages, and taking a very open, intellectually rigorous and diversity-affirming approach to religion. The only aspect in which it is not perfect for me is that it's strictly gender segregated. They're really doing their best to aim for 'separate but equal'; the women's gallery is very much part of the action, and has three sections, with no barrier, a waist-height barrier, and a head-height barrier so women can choose how much they want to be separate from the male congregants. And a sound-proof, glass-walled room with the imam's words piped in over PA for mothers with young children. They also have female leadership but not actually a woman imam. So they're very progressive and egalitarian compared to most UK mosques, but I personally find the strict division by gender very uncomfortable, even if the women genuinely are of equal status with the men.
So anyway, way more Covid risk than I have been accepting up to now, but a completely brilliant couple of days. I'm looking forward to dinner with OSOs, and a quieter week for the middle of the festival, culminating in last night Seder for my family of choice.
Anyway, I wanted to tell you about this weekend, which is of course the start of Pesach and also Easter. Happy festivals to Jewish and Christian peeps. It's also the middle of Ramadan, and people are getting excited about the confluence of all three, though I think it's not that surprising since Easter and Pesach are supposed to coincide (even we don't quite make it every year), and Ramadan lasts a whole month so lots of things overlap with Ramadan. But in my personal life, this confluence means I spent Friday night at a Seder with my family of origin (but couldn't invite most of my family of choice because it was Good Friday for them), and yesterday evening at an interfaith iftar event, and today I am going to OSOs for Easter dinner.
We had a long discussion among the family about whether we could manage in person Seder this year. We really wanted to do it; until 2020 we always, always gathered for first night of Pesach regardless of where we were in the world or what else was going on in our lives. But cases are very high indeed, and a meal lasting many hours with lots of talking and singing feels almost certain to lead to Covid transmission; we just had to rely on hoping none of us had it. We all obtained permission from our respective bubbles and decided we'd go ahead. In the event, my dad got a positive test just far enough ahead of the festival that he was clear by this week, and my sister was unluckier with the timing and was still positive by yesterday. Both had only mild symptoms and seem to have come through, but P'tite Soeur and her partner ended up joining on Zoom after all. So it was parents, three of the four sibs,
jack, Thuggish Poet's partner, and H, a refugee who lived with my parents for some months until his immigration status was sorted out. Absolutely tiny by our usual standards, but also a huge and momentous gathering by the standards of the past couple of years.One advantage of Pesach coinciding with Easter is that it's easy for me to take plenty of time off work to do the Pesach prep. So this year's cleaning was relatively unstressful, especially since I wasn't also preparing a Seder meal at the same time.
jack was amazingly supportive and we actually had the whole kitchen thoroughly sorted out within half an hour of the deadline on Friday. We basically gave up on cleaning the rest of the house, partly because I'm trying to maintain a distinction between dirt and actual chametz, and partly because plague means we're unlikely to want to invite any Jewish guests who might have higher standards of kashrut than me.So Friday afternoon we went over to my parents' and returned to our well-established routine of preparing the meal. It's harder without P'tite Soeur, who has professional chef experience and is brilliant at planning, delegating tasks and keeping everybody calm, but Screwy did a pretty excellent job for an amateur, and
jack is pretty much in the routine now after more than a decade of family Seders. It was difficult to convince Mum to scale back, cooking for 8 rather than our standard of 3X that many, but we managed to restrain ourselves to the tune of only one soup, two mains, two desserts plus fresh strawbs, and a modest number of side dishes. Menu was a cut down version of our usual, because nobody was in the mood to break with tradition in such a topsy-turvy year. boiled eggs in salt waterScrewy led the ceremony and did, as always, a completely wonderful job. He was very focused on not having vain blessings, which of course prompted lots of debate about whether or not to repeat things, and meta-debate about when we could have our discussions! Thuggish Poet's partner C, attending her first in-person Seder, had prepared the Four Questions which she sang for us <3. She isn't technically the youngest, that would be foster-brother H, but H is a veteran of many years of Seders now. C also came up with a great original question: why is there an egg on the Seder plate if it's never mentioned in the ceremony? The best answer we could come up with is that it may represent the chagigah sacrifice while the shankbone represents the pesach sacrifice, but that prompted some diversions about eggs as fertility symbols and that slightly embarrassing overlap between Easter eggs and the roles of eggs in our ceremony. H, brought up Alawite Muslim, has added a new ritual debate to our family tradition: whether it's right to translate Laban's demonym as
butternut squash soup
baked salmon or cauliflower moussaka
fresh asparagus, celeriac remoulade, green salad, Danish cucumber salad, new potatoes
caramel nusstorte, mango sorbet, fresh strawberries, with cream or icecream
a Syrian tried to kill my fatheror whether we should stick closer to the Hebrew and say
an Aramaean tried to kill my father.
We also debated whether we should replace the salt water of the first dipping with sugar water, to represent the trans-Atlantic slave trade; we did not actually do so, but we talked about the pros and cons of altering the ceremony in that way. Our additional object this year was some chrain, which is a traditional food from my father's family made of a mix of horseradish and beetroot, which prompted us to think about Ukraine and their struggle for liberation. I think some people have been using beetroot as borsht comes from Ukraine, and others sunflower seeds. We also had some discussion about what it would take to initiate an armed uprising against the current government and whether that would improve things at all. My opinion is that it's very difficult to inspire people to revolution in the name of wanting stuff to be a bit less shit, but it's not like coming up with an extremist counter-ideology would help matters.
The after meal part ended up a bit rushed; it turns out that aiming for the last train at 11:45 wasn't quite late enough to fit everything in comfortably, even though we started before the halachically correct time of sunset.
jack found the afikomen, and we exchanged books though not quite at the combinatorially excessive level of every person present gifting a book to every other person! I felt I'd done really well with a recent SF novel, The vanished birds by Simon Jimenez, and Between the world and me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a writer and thinker about race I have a great deal of regard for.We had a very very chill day yesterday; I didn't get up in time even to make to Zoom services. In the evening, I went to the big new Mosque for an interfaith iftar event. This all came out slightly strange; I was invited out of the blue as a guest speaker, and nobody quite explained why I'd been selected. I was really worried about doing this kind of event during plague, but was assured that numbers were limited to maintain social distancing, and that people wouldn't be offended if I declined to join in the actual break-fast meal. In practice numbers were not limited at all; when I actually got there it turned out that "only one hundred invitations" meant a hundred people had been invited and told to bring all their family and friends, and that was in addition to the regular congregation, which during Ramadan is huge. Also, the event where I was giving the talk was much more integrated with iftar than I'd realized, which is my error of assumption, I was thinking I'd give a talk to a small, select audience and then head home before the crowds started arriving for iftar itself, but in fact everybody, including families with small children, was in the mosque for the full 3 hour event. I'm not sure I would have gone if I'd known it was going to be 20 times bigger than any indoor gathering I've dared to attend since pandemic, but I'm also not sure that the risk of several hundred people in a very large and airy space is significantly more than the risk of one hundred people.
The event itself was just wonderful. A sort of open mingling event with tours of the building for visitors, both local people curious about Islam and Muslims from outside Cambridge who'd made a sort of pilgrimage, if I can stretch the term, to celebrate in the amazing mosque. Everybody was really nice and friendly and excited to meet me. There were half a dozen short talks; I abbreviated what I'd planned to say about the importance of fasting in Judaism because it was clear they expected more like 3-5 minutes than 10. At sunset people broke their fast with a cup of water and a handful of dates, and then we went into evening prayer. The way one of the imams pronounced it made me very belatedly realize that maghreb is in fact cognate to maariv, I'd just failed to spot it for years due to the transliteration of 'ayn as gh. The service was amazingly dignified for a prayer session standing between the hordes and their dinner, not rushed even a little bit.
The actual iftar meal was highly organized, they had loads of marshalls politely directing people to pick up food boxes and head to spaces on the floor or at tables, depending on preference, to eat. Feeding hundreds of hungry people that efficiently with no jostling or queuing was an amazing feat of logistics. Since lots of people were eating outside, and the organizers pressed a meal box into my hands even though I'd said I wouldn't be able to stay for the meal, I did in fact join them to eat. Obviously it wasn't really KFP; I ate some rice with chickpeas (I eat legumes, kitniyot, during Pesach), and picked out the samosas and bhajis. Which might in fact be made with gram flour rather than wheat but I wasn't sure.
CCM is very very nearly my ideal place of worship. It's completely multi-denominational, not only in terms of formally defined Shia or Sunni, but also inclusive of Muslims from all over the world, with imams from Bosnia, Turkey and Pakistan and a very international outlook. And really integrated into the local community, and welcoming to all ages, and taking a very open, intellectually rigorous and diversity-affirming approach to religion. The only aspect in which it is not perfect for me is that it's strictly gender segregated. They're really doing their best to aim for 'separate but equal'; the women's gallery is very much part of the action, and has three sections, with no barrier, a waist-height barrier, and a head-height barrier so women can choose how much they want to be separate from the male congregants. And a sound-proof, glass-walled room with the imam's words piped in over PA for mothers with young children. They also have female leadership but not actually a woman imam. So they're very progressive and egalitarian compared to most UK mosques, but I personally find the strict division by gender very uncomfortable, even if the women genuinely are of equal status with the men.
So anyway, way more Covid risk than I have been accepting up to now, but a completely brilliant couple of days. I'm looking forward to dinner with OSOs, and a quieter week for the middle of the festival, culminating in last night Seder for my family of choice.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-04-17 02:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-04-17 05:36 pm (UTC)Hope last night Seder goes well :)
(no subject)
Date: 2022-04-17 07:06 pm (UTC)We also debated whether we should replace the salt water of the first dipping with sugar water, to represent the trans-Atlantic slave trade
Didn't the Middle Passage involve salt water, both the Atlantic and oceans of tears?
At the second night seder, we had a whole second seder plate with the relatively new symbols.
The orange, for lesbians on the bima (and women, and queer people visible as Jewish leaders, and expansive new symbols on seder plates.)
An olive, for the hope of peace in the middle east.
A cherry tomato, to remember oppressed farmworkers.
A raw sweet potato, not to be eaten because it is the Pascal Yam, another symbol of the Temple sacrifice (and a reminder of the divine I Yam that I Yam.)
A square of chocolate, to remember child slavery (the children who pick cocoa beans, but also more generally. We didn't think to talk about old American sugar plantations and the triangle trade, but maybe we should next year.)
A piece of torn cloth, to remember sweatshop workers and those oppressed by the fast fashion industry.
Sunflower seeds to remember the people of Ukraine.
A bottle of water to remember the struggle for voting rights. (This would not work at all outside the US.)
(no subject)
Date: 2022-04-17 07:38 pm (UTC)Heh. I can't remember a time when I've been cleaning my place (as opposed to selling the entire flat and spending Pesach at my parents' or abroad) when I've finished on the day before erev Pesach earlier than 1am. And then I get all these emails from relatives wishing me a happy Pesach. When do they get time for it? (Possible answer: the week beforehand, and then leave the email in the drafts folder for a week.)
We basically gave up on cleaning the rest of the house, partly because I'm trying to maintain a distinction between dirt and actual chametz
Absolutely!
(I did likewise, but in my case because I had to juggle cleaning with looking after a three-year-old.)
Our additional object this year was some chrain, which is a traditional food from my father's family made of a mix of horseradish and beetroot, which prompted us to think about Ukraine and their struggle for liberation.
My community has been proactive in taking in refugees from the Ukrainian Masorti community; we volunteered to host some for a seder night, but there were enough other volunteers that we weren't needed. Which is possibly just as well, as Rafi and I both have colds atm.
The way one of the imams pronounced it made me very belatedly realize that maghreb is in fact cognate to maariv, I'd just failed to spot it for years due to the transliteration of 'ayn as gh.
Not quite. `Ayn ع and ghayn غ are different letters with different pronunciations. Biblical Hebrew had both sounds, but only one letter for them, which is why ע is not rendered in some names in the LXX and other ancient translations (e.g. Jacob), but is rendered G in others (e.g. Gomorrah, Gaza, Raguel, etc).
Aside from that, thanks for writing up the report; it was interesting to read.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-04-18 03:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-04-18 07:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-04-18 12:53 am (UTC)Around here the government has now decided that if you work in healthcare, people who have COVID in their immediate family but have personally tested negative can come to work anyway, but fortunately my workplace has said fuck no, that's a stupid idea. Two of eight people out this week, and both of them tested positive by the morning of the day after they would have been at work, had we followed the new regulations. It does indeed seem that the government now wants everyone to just constantly get COVID.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-04-18 06:48 pm (UTC)