Geek of All Trades

Passover

It's chol hamo'ed, the middle days of Passover.  I've eaten matzah with almond butter for lunch every day this week.  But there is great food associated with Passover as well.  We had seder at the home of our good friends Charlie and Abby; Abby talked about the menu here.

Then there's my favorite, matzah ball soup.  The matzah ball soup I made this year is above.  I use my great grandmother's recipe for the matzah balls, which comes out dense and chewy - I love them, no light and fluffy matzah balls for me.  This year I used a whole chicken and some carrots and celery for a tasty and hearty soup. 

The other passover standby is matzah brei, a mixture of broken and softened matzah pieces and egg that gets fried in a pan.  For most of my life I'd always eaten them sweet - adding nothing to the matzah and egg while cooking, and then sprinkling sugar and cinammon or spreading jam on the finished product.  A couple of years ago, though, we got a little sick of that, and I came up with the idea of making a savory matzah brei.  I sauteed some onions and mixed these back into the egg and matzah mixture before cooking, along with some salt and pepper.  The result was a nice change from the tired plain matzah brei, a little more satisfying and less breakfasty.  Last night I made such a savory matzah brei for dinner; in addition to the salt and pepper I added some garam masala for bite.

If Jimmy Buffett were Jewish...

... he'd be wastin' away in Manieschewitzville.

Eighth night

We lit up Grandma Dorothy's menorah each night of chanukah.  Here it is on the last night.

Family and Chanukah

What a week.  Early last Saturday morning we learned that David's aunt and grandmother had both passed away the previous night.  They were both ill and had been rapidly declining.  Even so, the synchronicity was spooky.  They were mother and daughter.  One died in her home, the other in a nursing home twenty miles away.  And neither ever had to be told that the other had passed.   

By 11:00 AM we had booked plane tickets for that evening, and we set about arranging a sitter for Demetrius, running some errands, and packing up our things.  We spent the next four days with David's family - mourning, telling stories, driving relatives to and from the airport, and just generally taking care of each other. 

We brought back Grandma's chanukah menorah; the timing seemed good, since Chanukah started the day after we got home.  And yesterday evening, on the first night, we set it up.

Baruch atah adonai eloheinu melech ha'olam shecheyanu v'kiy'manu v'higyanu lazman hazeh.

Blessed are you, our God, Creator of time and space, who has supported us, protected us, and brought us to this moment.

We will have a happy Chanukah, remembering David's aunt and grandmother and lighting our candles.  I hope you have a happy Chanukah too.

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We had a good Rosh Hashana, on balance.  Friday night, after services, we went for dinner to the home of Abby (of While She Naps) and The Real Charlie.  Charlie posted the wonderful menu they made for us.  He says they've made the brisket together about a dozen times - we've probably enjoyed it with them most of those dozen times, and we never get tired of it - it is the best brisket ever.  My mother has some theories about what the secret ingredient might be, but I will not offer them here, in case they are correct.  The beautiful homemade challah was also a delightful treat. 

On Saturday, we attended our morning services and then returned home with my dear friend L. to prepare lunch.  I hadn't seen L. in too many months - our lives have seemed too turbulent for more than just email exchange now and then - so it was excellent to see her.  Then we spent some time with David's family.

The religious component of the holiday, though, was not as fulfilling as the friends and family.  We attended the same service I've attended nearly every year since before I knew David - the Worship & Study service at Harvard Hillel.  We used to find it a moving and satisfying service, but it has long since lost its lustre.  The people we admired - the two excellent cantors and the previous group of lay leaders - have moved on, as people will with time, and we don't relate as well to the new guard.  Actually, I'm being a little kind and euphemistic.  To tell the truth, we think the rabbi is an idiot. We left this year's services so frustrated and grouchy - in every way the opposite of the way we want to feel after Rosh Hashana services - that we are thinking of going somewhere else for Yom Kippur - we don't want to wait until next year. 

An explosive situation

One morning a few weeks ago, my usually indomitable friend J. turned to me with furrowed brow and said, fear edging her softened voice, "Do you think the United States is going to bomb Iran?"

J.'s concern was as personal as it was political.  She was born in Iran.  Her family fled during the revolution, I think, and she lived most of her young life in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.  But Iran is her birthplace, her original home, and she seems (sometimes, at least) to think of herself as Persian first, and everything else that she is subordinately. 

I didn't know how to answer J.'s question, and neither did David, who is usually better equipped to speak on such matters than I.  Relations with Iran looked bad then, and they have only gotten worse in recent weeks. 

The U.N. is increasingly concerned with Iran's interest in obtaining the means to manufacture weapons-grade enriched uranium.  Iran's leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, appears to be a raving madman who seems hell-bent, Kim Jong-Il style, on demonstrating his independence and strength by defying, insulting, and provoking other world powers, especially the U.S. 

While I see the hypocrisy in efforts by the world's nuclear club to keep the club's doors closed to newcomers, it is hard to see how diplomacy can have any effect at all with Ahmadinejad, whose rhetoric echoes that of those who in the West are commonly called terrorists, and who in his speeches cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as evidence of the world-wide Jewish conspiracy he perceives.  One cannot imagine Security Council resolutions having any more sway on this man than they had on Saddam Hussein.   

Nevertheless, the American folly in Iraq has left the armed forces too depleted to launch a similar attack on Iran.  Ahmadinejad surely knows this, and spews his rhetoric secure in the belief that the U.S. and its allies will hesitate to take on another Iraq-style mission.  But the President and his administration aren't going to let Ahmadinejad thumb his nose at them with impunity for long.  They let Kim Jong-Il do so for fear of stepping on China's toes, but there is no such buffer for Iran.

And so, as ever, there is nothing but fear and uncertainty for the future in the Middle East.  Israel is more uncertain than ever, while Sharon languishes on life support; Palestine is led by Hamas; Iraq is God-knows-what; Iran is a war waiting to happen.  And I still don't know what to say to J., except to apologize for being an American, for the contributions that my country's missteps have made to this terrifying mess. 

Tampa Rath Yatra

A few weeks ago, my sister-in-law Sarah called to tell me that there was an Indian festival happening in Tampa called Rath Yatra.  She and my brother Philip didn't know anything about it, but they invited us to come down for the weekend and join them.  So we did.

Rath Yatra, it turns out, is the festival of the Pilgrimage of the Chariot of Lord Jagannath, originating in the state of Orissa in eastern India.  More to the point for our adventure in Tampa, in the United States Rath Yatra is a major Hare Krishna festival, organized and funded by the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. 

The festival wasn't all white guys with bald heads in saffron robes - though there were some of them around - and we had a great time.  The Hare Krishna folks served us a yummy free meal which we ate while watching Lord Jagannath's chariot go by.

We wandered around for a while, browsing the very few vendors' tents that were there - only the movie tent was irresistable to me, and I came home with a few new Bollywood DVDs - and looking at the lovely saris and kurtas worn by some of the attendees.  There were some terrific colors to be seen, and we enjoyed the warm sunshine while trying to decide which sari was prettiest. Eventually, the dance performances began - girls ranging in age from about 6 to maybe 18 or so in resplendent costumes gave challenging, impressive classical dance performances.  (Click on the pictures for a larger version, except the second one for some reason.)

 

While the girls were performing, the chariot parked beside the stage and Krishna devotees lined up to present offerings to Lord Jagannath and receive his blessings.

All in all, we had a very pleasant afternoon.

   

After the festival, in the Tampa airport, I met a woman who, it turned out, was a Krishna devotee from Los Angeles who is involved in organizing the enormous Rath Yatra festival in that city.   But she wasn't in Tampa for Rath Yatra - she didn't even know it was going on.  She was in Tampa to visit her mother for Greek Orthodox Christmas.  (I'm sure her spiritual path makes an interesting story!)  When I showed her the program for Tampa's Rath Yatra, she exclaimed in some surprise, "Hey, this was organized by actual Indians!"   Tells you something about how the Hare Krishna community in L.A. is a bit different from the one in Tampa. 

Sharing the Holocaust

I was moved by this thoughtful post by Bill Poser of Language Log on extending the semantic concept of the Holocaust to reach other genocidal atrocities.  There are evidently some Jews who feel a possessiveness about the capital-H version of the concept, and are reluctant to share the term with such exemplars of human devilry as the slaughter in Rwanda or the ongoing madness in Darfur.  Poser argues that associating atrocities other than the Nazis' systematic slaughter of Jews with the familiar concept of "holocaust" brings them into focus.  Arguing over whether any particular group's actions are deserving of a label such "holocaust" or "genocide" only diverts attention from the problem of ending such horrors and preventing them. 

Poser concludes with an observation that strikes a resonant chord with my own view of what Judaism is all about:

Because the Jewish Holocaust has name-recognition, assimilating other mass murders to it by using the same term for them serves to make them more salient, more familiar, and more horrible, which, I hope, stimulates action against them. If extending the term holocaust to what is happening in Darfur brings people to equate the Janjaweed with the Nazis and the people of Darfur with the Jews and helps to overcome the attitude that what is happening is too remote and is happening to people who are too different from us for us to feel more than nominal sympathy for them, that's a good thing. Speaking from a Jewish point of view, faced with the decision whether to emphasize the uniqueness of our holocaust or to emphasize its universality, if the latter might save even a single life, there is no question as to what choice to make. This is the way in which the commandments are fulfilled.

Amen.

Looking at God

This is the picture released by NASA a couple of weeks ago, showing the deepest view yet of the early universe, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope's Ultra Deep Field Camera. Nearly every speck of light that you can see in it is an entire galaxy; it is a view of only the tiniest section of the sky.

Pictures like this one illustrate the tremendous vastness of the universe and make me feel very, very tiny. I am sometimes given to thinking of God as the master experimental scientist, who sets the physical parameters for the universe - the fine structure constant shall be this, Planck's constant shall be that, the speed of light shall be just so - and then kicks back and watches the great experiment unfold. Looking at early universe pictures like this one truly does make me feel closer to God. I suppose that's a bit cliché, but there it is.