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

[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.