Livre d'Or

So this year chanukah started on Christmas Eve. ( babble )

There's a midrash on the Mishnah which lists the deeds whose principal reward is in the world to come: ... visiting the sick, celebrating the bride, attending the dead, which says that if someone you love is seriously ill you should perform the mitzvah of celebrating a bride, as that is listed between sick and dead, so you kind of symbolically make more space between the two states. Two weeks ago roughly my grandmother moved on from being terminally ill to actively dying, and of course it was impossible for anyone to really predict just how urgently I needed to rush home.

During the week I had lots of responsibilities in the medical school it would have been really annoying to duck out of, though I'm sure I would have got permission if I'd asked. And at the weekend I had planned to go to a wedding with jack, so in the end I decided that I would go ahead with what I had intended to do anyway, and hope the timing would work out if I returned to my parents' place Sunday afternoon. So I travelled to Hastings late on Friday night (really annoying connection across London from Euston to Charing Cross, such that I ended up missing an hourly train by 30 seconds), and finally reached jack in a very quaint little B&B shaped like a brick castle. And in the morning we woke up and could hear and smell and see the sea, and that went a long way towards helping with being stressed and scared.

And the wedding itself was awesome, it involved an afternoon of folk dancing, mostly Morris dancing and related styles, at several locations along the sea front. It was really nice to be able to mingle with the other guests and watch the dancing and buy icecreams and chips and beer and it generally really chilled. In the evening we went indoors to a former church, St Mary in the Castle, a rather amazing venue set into the hillside. And there was more dancing, a mix of demonstrations and more participatory ceilidh dancing, and a pot-luck buffet, and some really touching speeches, and it was very much what a wedding should be, a gathering of friends and family who genuinely wanted to celebrate the couple.

( some religious and some medical discussion about death )

Anyway, I feel a bit emotionally numb in some ways, I haven't really taken in the idea that Granny will continue not to be there in the coming weeks and months. But I do feel very confident that all my people will be here to take care of me and eachother.

My brother the poet has been involved in activism for and outreach work visiting the occupied territory of Western Sahara for some years now. His latest big project was bringing poems from the Saharawi bardic tradition to an English audience; he worked with interpreters who provided him with literal translations, which he then interpreted as poetry. And he's made them into a book alongside expert commentary and beautiful Arabic calligraphy illustrations by the senior translator and some original poetry.

I'm an academic, so I find it a bit strange that the first ever Saharawi poetry in English is coming out from a tiny little indie publisher and funded by a Kickstarter campaign, rather than being a scholarly work. But also admirable in the sense of trying to bypass the master's tools approach, it's somewhat less than it might be another incident of privileged people from former colonial powers continuing to profit from studying colonized peoples.

Anyway, it's a bit late to tell you about this, but in case anyone is free in London tonight, Sam is launching the book at a music and slam night this evening.

ghoti requested: I'm talking about family traditions, could you do that too?

So one thing my family do, more rarely nowadays, but on occasions when we're all together for Friday night meals, is we do a full sung grace after meals. Which is to say, about six pages, some chanted but mostly singing, with call-and-response and multi-part harmony and gestures and sound-effects and drumming on the table. We learned this initially at Hengrave and expanded on it at youth camp. And you understand that absolutely nobody in my family of origin can carry a tune, don't imagine some cute pious tableau of everybody sitting round the table singing religious songs, it's much more about raucous cacophony.

And there's puns and sarcastic asides and arguments about some of the theology and gender politics, which have themselves almost become part of the ritual. Like, everybody points at me at a tower of salvation to God's own king because malco is similar to the playground insult mal-co[ordinated]. We argue whether in the sight of God and mankind is sexist, or rather, whether adam means 'human being' or the personal name Adam, which should then according to egal traditions be replaced with 'Adam and Eve'. (I'm on the side of the argument that is actually grammatically correct, if anyone feels tempted to chip in at this point.) Or whether we should include the traditional quote from the Psalm I have been a youth and now I am old, and I have never seen the righteous in want, nor their offspring begging for bread, or whether R' Gryn (of blessed memory)'s replacement prayer is ableist because of May we not be blind to the needs of others, nor deaf to their cry for food.

Another thing we do that's special to my family is, at the Passover seder meal, we always tell my great uncle's joke, it's almost become part of the ritual. The joke is that a Jewish man is going to be knighted for his achievements, and he is taught a Latin tag that he's supposed to recite when he's presented to the Queen. But at the crucial moment, his mind goes blank, so he says the first foreign thing that comes into his head, the opening to the Four Questions traditionally recited by the youngest child at a Passover seder: Mah nishtanah halayla hazeh mikol haleylot. And the Queen turns to Prince Philip and says, "Why is this knight different from all other knights?" (a homophone for the ritual question, why is this night [of Passover] different from all other nights?) I knew jack was going to fit in to my family when he took on telling this joke one year. jack tells it really well, actually, he makes the experience of the confused Jewish knight-to-be really vivid.

It's strange to tackle this prompt, actually. I'm not sure there's a lot we do that isn't fairly typical for English Reform Jews, but equally that's a fairly small and not well known culture, so maybe I should talk about things that I think of as 'normal' but would seem surprising to other people. But anyway, here's a couple of examples to be going on with.

[December Days masterpost]

Sometime after midnight on Friday, my husband met from the train and swept me up and took me home and fed me tea and it was so very nice to see him after too many weeks apart. I suppose we're going through the typical phase of a year-old marriage, that we have let ourselves get too busy to spend time together regularly, but when we do manage to plan an actual date it's still a big excitement. With the long distance thing, we don't even get the minimal habitual contact that couples can fall into, the sitting in the same house spodding or having trivial conversations about domestic practicalities.

( yay weekend, only minimally coupley )

Talking of siblings, my brother the poet has a nice rant about the current political classes' attacks on the poor and disabled. And my brother the philosopher is at that stage of writing up a PhD where it's hard for him to have much brain space or time for anything else, but he occasionally phones me and asks me complicated science questions like "where do the recommended daily amounts of calories come from?"

It appears to be Epiphany already and I haven't got round to writing about Chanukah. So a quick summary:

( joy )

So that was the last week of 2011. Mostly summed up by time with families. It's really getting to the point where it feels as if I'm part of jack's small, close-knit, quiet family, and he is part of my large, noisy, argumentative family. I feel very good about this.

Friday dinner: shabbat chez AF, to say farewell to him before he heads off for Israel. It was very like the Friday nights of my childhood, with out-of-tune singing and enthusiastic liturgical geeking and a bit of sibling bickering. I really appreciate the way AF's family include me!

Saturday breakfast: Very rushed slice of toast and cup of tea, so I could catch a train to Brighton earlier than I normally get up on a Saturday.

( well fed up and agreeably drunk )

My life is so incredibly wonderful!

That was a much more partyish weekend than I usually manage, and besides, I managed to see all three of my siblings (though more consecutively than together). Yay for being unemployed and in the same country as lots of cool people!

( party girl )

I took the first step on the way to looking grown-up and respectable today, when I acquired new glasses. My first new ones in 10 years, and I decided to be radical and go for a change of style rather than trying to find the closest match to what I'm used to. The next step probably ought to be a haircut, but I really hate doing that. We'll see.

So, apart from the job interview craziness, I managed to cram in quite a bit of socializing.

( social diary )

Hope everyone that's celebrating is enjoying Pesach at the moment.

( my pesach )

I made it back to Stockholm without incident Sunday evening. The very curtailed visit was necessary because I ended up with teaching commitments Monday afternoon as well as Thursday. The teaching is great fun, and I should make a separate post about it.

I must admit, I feel somewhat deflated at the moment. Partly it's that I don't quite have the emotional balance of seeing cartesiandaemon very briefly and intensely and then being away from him for several weeks; I'm sure I'll settle into it, but just now I'm crashing hard after each visit. I've never been like this in long distance relationships in the past, and we have plenty of communication in spite of geography, so I'm not sure why I'm reacting like this. I think in this case it's partly plain tiredness; I haven't really had a proper break this Pesach, or even time to recover from last week being manic. Partly it's all my skin and membranes being irritated because of spending time in horrible allergenic Cambridge (though my breathing settled down within a few hours of leaving). And I think partly it's Pesach itself. I don't really like being on my own during the festival, even though I have at least managed a seder en famille and exactly as it should be. There's plenty that I can eat, of course, but all of it requires preparation and forward planning, and I can't snack on toast or biscuits or even buy junk food.

Oh well, this is a very minor complaint. Communication would be appreciated, even if it's just LJ comments, and it's much more likely that I'll be happy to hear from you than whiny.