I cut the maps up to cheat distance

[sovay]

I have not attended weekly services of any kind since I was in grad school. My most regular attendance was actually in college. (See also: how I learned to chant Torah in thirteen days when I was twenty-one years old.) That is nearly fifteen years ago now. Daylight Savings falls back and I remember that ma'ariv falls back, too, because now the sun sets an hour earlier. Fridays are all candles and steepening winter darkness from now on until the sun turns around at the solstice. It is interesting the things that stay in your head, the things that don't.

Comments

[sovay]

Wouldn't it be great if we could really do that, cut maps to cheat distance? I guess it's a more violent form of tesseract.

It's a wonderful idea of sympathetic magic: piecing the map together, following it across boundaries that should be miles and oceans apart. I think so long as you made the roads line up, you could walk it safely.

The common narrative is that people fall off with their religious observances when they go to college, but that's all that is: just a common narrative. I can think of many reasons why a person might go the other direction.

I knew people who went both ways: one friend from an extremely Orthodox household who by the end of his freshman year had given up almost all observance (rather dramatically including keeping kosher) and a non-Jewish friend who by our senior year had converted and is now Modern Orthodox (although I believe in a somewhat less turbo-charged fashion than when she started) and a variety of greater or lesser shifts in various directions. The Brandeis term for going zero-to-sixty on religious observance was "frum out," which I assume is shared by the wider Jewish community. (Yiddish פֿרום‎, frum—devout, observant, generally applied to Chasidim/Orthodox; can be negative, in the sense of sanctimonious or holier-than-thou; can also be self-descriptive.) It wasn't uncommon.

What do you think it was in your case?

A couple of factors, of which I think the strongest is that I was an undergraduate at Brandeis: I was surrounded by Jewish life and so it was possible for me to participate without having to go very far out of my way for it, like Portland where my grandparents' congregation had been. (In some senses it was impossible not to: Simchas Torah and Purim were great nights to get woken up by very loud, very enthusiastic groups of students on their way back from ritually partying.) I had two major friend groups and one of them was basically the core of Brandeis' Conservative Egalitarian minyan at the time. They were happy to have me turn up for services and holidays and be called to the bimah and learn to chant Torah and throw my back out dancing with a Torah scroll (not recommended) without any pressure for me to observe halakhah I felt no particular draw to, or actively disagreed with. I was not treated as a tourist. Nobody pulled my first-semester roommate's 'I thought you were Jewish" stunt. If I went looking for a shul now, it would probably not be Conservative for a variety of reasons (although a couple of the halakhic ones that really burned me in college have since changed, which is neat), but that particular minyan was an incredibly useful community for me at the time. I did not belong entirely there, but I have never been anywhere I belonged entirely.

[edit] If you're asking what beyond mere proximity made me interested, I think the answer is that it is part of my family and an important part whose major link broke when my grandmother died and my grandfather moved to Boston and now I had the opportunity to reconnect. I taught myself Yiddish at Brandeis, too.

What do you think of the idea to have New England be part of the Atlantic time zone?

I hadn't heard anything about it! Is the idea that it would bring our clocks more into alignment with our geographical location? (How badly would it put us out of synch with the rest of the Eastern Seaboard?)

I say that with trailing-off ellipses because what does stay isn't always what I'd choose to have stay, and what goes often is stuff that I wish remained.

Yes.

[asakiyume]

I did not belong entirely there, but I have never been anywhere I belonged entirely. It isn't what I judge a welcome on. Ditto, and ditto. It sounds as if part of what made them as welcoming as they were was that they were eager for your participation without pressuring; they accepted those not-fitting parts as integral to who you, their friend, were.

That freshman roommate though O_o

Re: Atlantic time, I think it's more to give us a better share of daylight, but yes, it would be very weird to have to switch times when going to New York, for example. We'd share a time zone with Nova Scotia and Puerto Rico. Here's one of the stories on it--it was in the news because a commission gave its recommendation (yes, switch).

[sovay]

It sounds as if part of what made them as welcoming as they were was that they were eager for your participation without pressuring; they accepted those not-fitting parts as integral to who you, their friend, were.

I think so. It was nice.

That freshman roommate though

It was not a good match. She moved out at midwinter. My second-semester freshman roommate was a wonderful person whose idea of a comfortable climate was one hundred percent incompatible with mine, so one of us was either freezing or overheating at all times, but we got through it.

Here's one of the stories on it--it was in the news because a commission gave its recommendation (yes, switch).

Thank you! Fascinating. I am so used to New England winter being dark.

[asakiyume]

I am so used to New England winter being dark.

I think even with a switch, New England winter would still feel dark. There's only so many hours of light, no matter where they're situated. (I'm thinking of the winter we spent in Dorset: Sun didn't rise until about 8 am and set around 3 pm. No switch in time zone would help that...)

[asakiyume]

(I missed the edit on first read-through--thank you for that extra! It's very cool that you taught yourself Yiddish, and mending that link makes huge emotional sense.)

[drwex]

how I learned to chant Torah in thirteen days when I was twenty-one years old

Dude! That's seriously impressive.

without any pressure for me to observe halakhah I felt no particular draw to,

As a youth I attended a synagogue that served in part as a training ground for rabbis from various schools who would come down (always from New York) to spend some time and do their thing and be observed. One of the things they had to do was deliver a sermon, a kind of final exam, not just based on that week's Torah portion but on their philosophy of being a rabbi. Most of them were formulaic and forgettable, but one has always stuck with me:

This rabbi compared living a Jewish life to walking a road of jewels. Some jewels are easy to pick up, some take a lot of effort. Some you walk by, some you come back for after thinking about it for a while. Nobody picks up every jewel and at the end of the road no matter what you have some jewels in your pocket, even if you've put down some that you picked up earlier.

Obviously, this speech stayed with me.

[sovay]

Dude! That's seriously impressive.

Thank you!

Obviously, this speech stayed with me.

I can see why. It's a strong image. I ran into something similar on Tumblr recently—was the rabbi you heard a student of Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf?

[drwex]

Fascinating - that's very similar. The speech was a one-off, long ago so perhaps my memory is distorted and that Tumblr is closer to the original. I don't know if I ever knew who the student Rabbis studied with originally. They'd show up unannounced, stay for a few weeks or a couple months, then be gone. I imagine the parents knew more about it, but nobody told the kids.

Except the one...

One of them showed up with a bumper sticker on his car that said "Shiksas are for practice." He... didn't last.