march 31 - chol hamoed
returned hot and dusty and sweaty from the bat
caves 3 hours before yomtov, with in laws staying + 2 extra guests, to
discovert here is no electricity and hte shower isn;t working. it's all
a test, it's all a test, it's all a test.
Ben has now found a very
helpful neighbour who has fixed the electricity, with the caveat that we
don;t yet know what iti s that keeps tripping the fuse. and i need that
fridge-freezer!
earlier on march 31 - chol hamoed
we're
at the bat cave. There are a lot of people and some sunbirds outside but no sign of Robin
march 29 (chol hamoed)
listening to the radio this morning, i
heard two gems from the chief rabbi of holon (i think it was). First he
was expounding on how chad paami stuff that is treated with some
product which is absoultely not fit for a dog to eat, and so it totally
does not at all ever not even by chumra need a hechsher. and he went on
to say that even if the surface/coating would break up and bits get in
the food, no misrad habriyut would ever permit this stuff to be eaten,
so it's not a problem if it gets into the food.
maybe it's jsut me, but i thought that this was not entirely reassuring.
....
ok and then, a woman called in to ask
something to do with kitniyot. and in the course of reassuring her, and
insisting and emphasising jsut nhow much kitniyot is not chametz and
cannot be sold with chametz because it is not chametz, he said that a
sephardi is obligated to eat kitniyot, because if they don;t, then all
that is left ot eat is matzah, and who can say if the matzah is really
kosher?
march 28 - chol hamoed
Fantastic lovely day by Ein Hemed.
beautiful surroundings, shallow stream for children to get grubby
catching tadpoles, crusader fortress, and somewhat out-of-context, shows
about robin hood and king arthur. it felt - a little discordant. but
fun though.
...
it's been a busy couple of days. oh the many
things to share! first off, i'm sure you are all agog to discover that
our cockatiel is ashkenazi, as revealed by the fact that he has been
eating mainly potatos and disdaining his sesame seeds.
march 27
had a wonderful day - spent an hour with Y
& M sifting through archaeological rubble at Har Tzofim. We found
bone (probably from korbanot in one of the mikdashim); byzantine-era
fresco; a flint knife; loads of pottery shards; and who knows what all
the stone tiles we found are from! extremely cool.
march 25 - erev pesach!
note this year's new pesach craft - krias yam suf table runner.
march 21
i'm making stuffed courgettes. because life is too short to stuff a mushroom
march 19
this fb post:
"rather odd request: we have totally mislaid a box of all our pesach china. I didn;t give or sell it to someone, did i?
Does anyone remember my selling or giving you a lot of white pesach
china? please repond if so, i can;t think how i would have gotten rid of
all our 24 settings of china, but we can;t find it anywhere."
was speedily followed by this one:
"Ok, never mind. it seems we did sell it. i just can;t remember why we did."
just in case you doubted that making aliyah can sometimes cause you to fail to pay enough attention to small but important details.
ben
went round to check on our plumber's progress and ended up singing adir
hu with him. turns out the plumber is a trained chazzan but he likes
plumbing better (reminds me of someone i know! ;-)
the young
israeli guy who came to clean our oven is also a yoga teacher and
explained to me that the pretty symbol on my wallet is the word 'om'
which is the sound with which creation began, in yoga, and in Judaism is
a Name of G-d. he was alot more knowledgeable than the pakistani woman
on the tesco's checkout who first told me it was a hindu symbol.
my very brave and just but slightly fool-hardy
husband went to want was advertised as rav steinman speaking about
something to do with the 'threat to charedim' (ie mainly the draft). in
the event, r' steinman spoke on a video link up for 45 seconds.
BUT when ben came out, he found a small group of nutters (he thinks
neturai karta nutters) holding posters and shouting something derogatory
about rav steinman. then, a bunch of
hotbloods came out of the rav steinman 'talk' and began to shout back,
and try to take their posters and knock their shtreimels off. So my
lovely and justice-loving husband got between the two groups to try to
stop the riot. all by himself, i asked? oh no, there were a couple of
other guys too.
he says the streimel-wearing nutters were not
trying ot retaliate at all. Ben just shouted at them all to leave them
alone, go off home, etc. Eventually, the yeshivish nutters herded the
other nutters off down the street, and then the police turned up, so ben
felt that he could leave it to them now.
Saturday night punch-up.
'and i'll huff and i'll puff and i'll blow
your house down'! Massive gust of wind just snapped all the screws and
twine holding together th esuccah frame that was still on our mirpesset.
Ben has gone down to the bottom of the hillside to retrieve twisted
remains of said succah frame from its resting place several metres
below.
putting yc to bed the other night, i sang him 'homeward bound'. he asked 'who wrote it, was it carlebach?'
just to prove my other children can be funny
also - Y the other day 'oh, devarim! I don;t want to get into that! it's
just moshe talking talking for the whole thing'.
and learning
navi - yehoshua/joshua - with michali today, she was a bit fidgety and
wanting to be elsewhere. i said 'the next bit's really cool'. she looked
a little unconvinced. then we read the pasuk with the stones flling out
the sky onto the emori. i said 'told you. you weren;t expecting barad there, were you?'. nope. and nor were they.
and...2 nights ago, M came downstairs half an hour after being put to
bed saying she couldn;t sleep. ben said (jokingly) 'oh i get it, you
want to do more pesach cleaning don;t you?' M nodded enthusaistically.
so she cleaned out another cupboard nad went off to bed. balabusta in
the making.
Another piece of Torah which i have only now
yunderstood after living here. In the gemara (taanis i think, but i
can;t remember daf & amud), we are told that we can understand
techias hameisim (resurrection of the dead) in some part by observing
the way that a seed is planted, decomposes nd appears to be dead, and
then revives when it rains. Truly, living in england this did not relaly
impinge - it always rains, and so there
is no real time of year when every thing looks dead and bare. but here
for much of the year everything really is dead and bare, brown and grey
and it looks like nothing is there and nothing is alive. And then it
rains, and all of a sudden you discover that grass and plants and fruits
and flowers were all there, all the time, but you couldn;t see them at
all.
so only now do i actualy understand why the gemara uses this
analogy for techias hameisim. so i suppose i also understand better, to
some extent, how techias hameisim can possibly happen.
and i
actually feel rather sad at facing the prospect of all the flowers and
plants dying again as the summer heats up, of all the green withering
away and disappearing.
trying to explain to yc tonight about
ashkenazim and sephardim (it's all because of kitniyot that it came up
at all). i told him that after the romans destroyed the mikdash, Jews
couldn;t live in eretz yisrael any more, we had to live in other
countires which are not our home. he looked v puzzled and said 'but this
family does'. so i told him that htat is because moshiach is nearly
here and so jews can live in eretz yisrael again.
so then i told him that jews went to live in lots of different
countries, like india and morocco and spain, and he asked what they
speak in india, and was totally shocked that they don;t speak hebrew OR
american.
once we got to the end of the ashkefardi debate, he said 'but Hashem doesn;t laugh'.
i said why? and he said 'becasue no one says funy things to Him. if
people say funny things they don;t say them to Him so He never laughs'. i
didn;t tell him that Hashem laughs whenever we plan.
also is quite tickled that Y has changed the
background on the computer account to a bust of a roman emperor - i
think it's antoninus pius. tiled across the whole screen. though the
effect is a little startling and does make it hard to find all the
icons.
