devarim

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...in other words, "Oh no, not again."

I think I have strep throat. Culture tomorrow morning. Have I mentioned that I hate using up my sick time, even when I'm actually sick, and even though I derive no benefit from not using it?

Today I came across the following part of the Massachusetts Code:

General Laws of Massachusetts
. .PART I Administration of the Gorvernment
. . .TITLE I. Jurisdiction and Emblems of the Commonwealth, The General Court, Statutes, and Public Documents
. . . .CHAPTER 2. Arms, Great Seal, and Other Emblems of the Commonwealth

Some of the sections are hilarious, taken individually or together with others...

[Be careful in your gardening endeavors...]

§ 7. Flower or floral emblem of commonwealth; protection; penalty.

Section 7. The mayflower (epigaea repens) shall be the flower or floral emblem of the commonwealth. Any person who pulls up or digs up the plant of the mayflower or any part thereof, or injures such plant or any part thereof except in so far as is reasonably necessary in procuring the flower therefrom, within the limits of any state highway or any other public way or place, or upon the land of another person without written authority from him, shall be punished by a fine of not more than fifty dollars; but if a person does any of the aforesaid acts while in disguise or secretly in the nighttime he shall be punished by a fine of not more than one hundred dollars. The provisions of this section shall be enforced by all officers in the division of law enforcement in the department of fisheries, wildlife and environmental law enforcement.

* * *

§ 9. Bird or bird emblem of commonwealth.

Section 9. The chicadee (Penthestes atricapillus) shall be the bird or bird emblem of the commonwealth.

[Surprisingly enough, it's not Sam Adams.]

§ 10. Beverage of commonwealth.

Section 10. Cranberry juice shall be the beverage of the commonwealth.

* * *

§ 12. Insect or insect emblem of commonwealth.

Section 12. The lady bug shall be the insect or insect emblem of the commonwealth.

* * *

§ 15. Gem or gem emblem of commonwealth.

Section 15. Rhodonite shall be the gem or gem emblem of the commonwealth.

§ 16. Marine mammal or marine mammal emblem of commonwealth.

Section 16. The right whale (Eubalaena Glacialis) shall be the marine mammal or marine mammal emblem of the commonwealth.

§ 17. Fossil or fossil emblem of commonwealth.

Section 17. The dinosaur track shall be the fossil or fossil emblem of the commonwealth.

§ 18. Mineral or mineral emblem of commonwealth.

Section 18. Babingtonite shall be the mineral or mineral emblem of the commonwealth.

* * *

[Allow me to present the rocks of the Commonwealth, not to be confused with the official gem or the official mineral thereof...]

§ 22. Rock or rock emblem of commonwealth.

Section 22. The Roxbury Puddingstone (Roxbury Conglomerate), shall be the rock or rock emblem of the commonwealth.

§ 23. Historical rock of commonwealth.

Section 23. Plymouth Rock, located in the town of Plymouth, shall be the historical rock of the commonwealth.

§ 24. Explorer rock of commonwealth.

Section 24. Dighton Rock shall be the explorer rock of the commonwealth.

§ 25. Building and monument stone of commonwealth.

Section 25. Granite shall be the building and monument stone of the commonwealth.

* * *

§ 28. Muffin of commonwealth.

Section 28. The corn muffin shall be the official muffin of the commonwealth.

* * *

§ 33. Soil of commonwealth.

Section 33. The Paxton Soil Series shall be the official soil of the commonwealth.

* * *

[Hey, as Lindsay said, "It's better than Massachusettsinsians."]

§ 35. Designation of citizens of commonwealth.

Section 35. Bay Staters shall be the official designation of citizens of the commonwealth.

§ 36. Game bird of commonwealth.

Section 36. The wild turkey (Meleagris Gallopavo) shall be the game bird and game bird emblem of the commonwealth.

* * *

[Too bad our official beverage isn't milk.]

§ 42. Cookie of commonwealth.

Section 42. The chocolate chip cookie shall be the official cookie of the commonwealth.

* * *

§ 49. Children's book of commonwealth

Section 49. The book "Make Way For Ducklings" by Robert McCloskey shall be the official children's book of the commonwealth.

[But...]

§ 50. Children's author and children's illustrator of commonwealth

Section 50. The author Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, shall be the official children's author and children's illustrator of the commonwealth.

-=- FOR THE MUSICALLY INCLINED -=-

[Yes, there are eight sections here...]

§ 19. Song of commonwealth.

Section 19. The song "All Hail to Massachusetts", words and music by Arthur J. Marsh, shall be the song of the commonwealth.

§ 20. Folk song of commonwealth.

Section 20. The song "Massachusetts", words and music by Arlo Guthrie, shall be the folk song of the commonwealth.

§ 27. Ceremonial march of commonwealth.

Section 27. The song "The Road to Boston", composer unknown, shall be the official ceremonial march of the commonwealth.

§ 31. Patriotic song of commonwealth.

Section 31. The song "Massachusetts (Because of You Our Land Is Free)", words and music by Bernard Davidson, shall be the patriotic song of the commonwealth.

§ 32. Folk dance of commonwealth.

Section 32. Square Dancing shall be the official folk dance of the commonwealth.

§ 43. Glee club song of commonwealth.

Section 43. The song "The Great State of Massachusetts", words by George A. Wells, and music by J. Earl Bley, shall be the glee club song of the commonwealth.

§ 44. Polka of commonwealth.

Section 44. The words and music of "Say Hello to Someone in Massachusetts" by Lenny Gomulka shall be the official polka of the commonwealth.

§ 47. Ode of the commonwealth.

Section 47. The words and music of "Ode to Massachusetts" by Joseph Falzone shall be the official ode of the commonwealth.

Well, according to the quick in-office test, I don't have strep. I do have some nasty allergy complications, and my head still feels like it's stuffed full of cotton, so I've taken the whole day off of work. All that means, of course, is that I'm spending my day doing laundry and washing dishes in between bouts of feeling sorry for myself. At least it's a nice, sunny day, so I can feel sorry for myself while enjoying the weather through the windows. If I can unstuff my head a little (and, really, it feels like feverish stuffiness, not nasal/sinus stuffiness, but try telling that to the therometer that insists that I'm just fine), I'll venture out again for lunch...may as well take advantage of my proximity to shwarma, y'know?

Interesting discovery of the morning: J.P. Licks now has wasabi ice cream. No, I haven't tried it yet. I suppose I could get that instead of the shwarma, but it's probably less filling (and less spicy, the way I order my shwarma). If this is all just really bad allergies, then spicy is good, right? I'll save the ice cream sampling for Saturday night.

Everyone please welcome UberImma to the public blogosphere. Her new blog is Door Number Three. Yes, she had another blog prior to this. No, she will not provide the link. If you think you know who UberImma is, feel free to email me and ask (though I don't promise to answer).

In the Science/Health section of today's New York Times, there is an article about eating disorder web sites, commonly known as pro-ana (for anorexia) and pro-mia (for bulimia) sites.

My first thought: where has the Times been all these years? I found a bunch of these sites three years ago.* Not for any relevant reason, mind you; I can't remember how I stumbled across the first one, but then my usual morbid curiosity took over and a spent a terrifying few hours clicking from site to site, shocked (probably more than I should have been) at the way teenage girls (and they are almost all girls) talk abut Ana and Mia as if they were best friends, trading tips for how to hide these "friends" from concerned family members and affirming that thin is beautiful. Thin, as in emaciated. But in control...or, at least, tryiing desperately to be in control of food consumption and weight gain, because everythig else is out of control.

So, back to the original point...why is the Times only mentioning these web sites now? Is it just because some study-in-progress recently released some results? Was the potential damage, the potential effect on ED girls and their families, non-existent before this week? I suppose there's the usual explanation of news cycles and peaks of interest and study publicity, but on the other hand I can't help but wonder whether there's other information - relevant to me and my life - that the newspapers just sit on, waiting for the appropriate moment in the news cycle while in the meantime I don't even know what it is I should be researching on my own.

OK, I don't wonder. I know it's there...I just want to know what it is.

* I know it was three years ago, because I remember distinctly sitting at my desk when it was in a particular location in my second Manhattan apartment, with my back to the kitchen, and it was only in that spot for the first few weeks after I moved in June of 2002.

Whoops. It's now the second day of Sivan. Yay cheesecake!

I woke up this morning to a report on the news saying that Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Weymouth had suffered a devestating fire overnight. It's terribly sad when any place of worship and community gathering is damaged or destroyed, and this is even more poignant because there were to be weddings today and tomorrow in the historic building. My sympathy goes out to the entire community, who until now had probably felt incredibly lucky to retain their "home" during the recent wave of church and school closings.

But...in the car on the way to work this morning, I continued listening to the news and heard a snippet of an interview with the church's cantor (I didn't even know they had those). And what did she say? "I looked at the church and it reminded me of September 11th."

Now, I can't fault you for being reminded of something. You have no control over the inner workings of your subconscious mind. I can, however, get righteously pissed at you for saying that out loud. No matter how precious a place of worship is, it is still nothing more than a building. One firefighter was seriously injured, but as far as I know, no one was killed.

I have no idea how you compare this to nineteen maniacs taking over four airplanes full of innocent people, and then proceeding to crash those planes into large buildings full of other innocent people (though failing as to one plane). How do you compare a seeing the aftermath of a church fire to watching people jumping hand-in-hand with their coworkers from the hundreth floor of a burning office building. How do you compare the smoky air around an extinguished fire to the concrete dust and charred bits of human flesh that wafted over Manhattan for nearly a week, causing residents as far as six miles away to shut their windows lest they choke on the fumes (or, at least, the thought of what they were smelling).

So, please, I know you can't always help what you're thinking, but maybe sometimes you should keep your thoughts to yourself.

Miriam Bloghead discusses an article about the high cost of "living Jewish". Nothing new under the sun, but it sparked an interesting discussion (read both Miriam's commentary and the discussion in the comments). My contribution to the discussion:

We are close be being priced out of our neighborhood (Brookline, MA), if we want to raise even two children here and maintain some kind of home life. It seems like the only families who can afford day school tuition (forget about "the extras"), without living an hour away from the school itself, are those where both parents work at high-income jobs. Unfortunately, those same jobs are often "soul-stealers": long hours, weekend work, business- or financially-oriented (rather than education, community service, do-gooder stuff). I could go out and get a $125,000+/year job in corporate law just to have the resources to send our (future) children to the right schools and give them all the right things, but part of raising them (to me, at least) is showing them that I'm using my education to better people's lives. Someone has to do the corporate legal work, but someone also has to stand up for battered women and agunot, to secure fair and reasonable child support, to ensure that all voices are given their proper moment before the law. What Jewish values will our children learn, if in order to teach them Gemara and Halacha we fail to teach them tzedaka and tikkun olam?

Am I yotzei Shavu'ot* without cheesecake? I'm making so many other desserts for our party Monday that I'm not sure I'll have time to make it as well, and of everything on the list it is the least party-friendly food.

Opinions? I'm serious here.

* I have no clue whether that sentence construct is even a little bit passable. I never quite "got" the grammatical aspects of yotzei/motzi bit of halachic discourse.

I can't believe it, but at 12:30 A.M. I am making a cheesecake. As in, I am just taking the mixer out at this moment. I am certifiable, I'm sure, but I blame it on the people who commented here.

Actually, quite the opposite. Have a script. Have them all!

(Found by way of DovBear.)

So I heard through the grapevine that a friend from my high school and college days recently (or maybe not so recently) came out...and he is also the co-founder of qjew, a dating website for gay and lesbian Jews.

Now, say what you want about queer Jews trying to reconcile and embrace these two fundamental aspects of their lives (and I'm sure someone out there will say something), but I think this is pretty cool. It's evidence of a strong connection to Judaism, a desire to build a life (and, perhaps, a family) grounded in Jewish values, Jewish history, and Jewish tradition. So what if you say that same-sex relationships are barred in Halacha? So is eating meat and dairy together, or not keeping taharat hamishpacha, or failing to observe any number of other mitzvot, but we don't throw our hands up in the air and lament secular Jews seeking out other (opposite-sex) secular Jews on JDate and arranging to meet over bacon cheeseburgers on a Friday night. Or maybe we do, but we're still happy that they're seeking out other Jews.*

OK, fine, I'm happy. I won't tell you to be happy. I will tell you that rejection and ridicule, in the long run, will only hurt your cause (whatever cause that may be).

-=-

* I could wade through the sticky mess of intermarriage, and raising Jewish children with one non-Jewish parent, and why I think we should embrace the these couples and their children, and all that fun stuff. I could, but I won't, because I'm too lazy to deal with it now.

About an hour ago, I was drawn out of my chair and onto our balcony by the sound of children? women? chanting and singing in Hebrew. I couldn't quite make out the words, but it sounded vaguely more or less like a kumsitz* so I smiled and bounced happily in the night air for a few moments, called Julian outside, and then bounced some more. I imagined a group of teens getting together for an end of the school year celebration, though I hadn't heard of any such thing planned by any of the local Jewish schools.

When the singing ended (after they morphed through a couple of niggunim [wordless melodies]) I heard a bit of laughter, followed by scattered shouts of: "Are you Jewish?" Now, of course, I just had to find out what was going on. I prodded Julian into putting on a sweater and some shoes (as for myself, I was already in PJs, and in an earlier life I would have gone just like that but apparently marriage has made me dignified, so I threw on some jeans, a sweater, and a hat) and away we went. Of course, by the time we had managed to get out of the building, down the block, and around the corner to the elementary school where the singing was (probably) coming from, whatever crowd had been there had already dispersed.

On our hurried walk, though, we saw a chasid (I couldn't identify the sect, sorry) walking down Harvard Street in the other direction. And across the street from the school was an empty yellow school bus. From "Yeshiva Bais Chaya Mushka." Numbered 770.**

Now, Julian doesn't think that a bunch of good chassidishe (OK, chabadnike) schoolgirls would be outside singing, and he's probably right, but I don't the bus just happened to be there by coincidence, either. We walked up and down a few blocks but could find no evidence of either the chabadnike schoolgirls or the ethereal campfire singers. And so my night ends, mystery unsolved.

-=-

* A somewhat impromptu camp-like gathering, for singing of Jewish or Zionistic songs, chanting, and possibly guitar- or drum-playing.

** OK, maybe I'm just having a lazy day, but I don't feel like explaining this either. Chabad. Rebbe. Schneerson. Moshiach. 770. Google it.

(with apologies to aNYj, who probably thinks this entire story is blasphemous)

In my current workplace, we have a shared one-cup-brew Flavia coffee maker. Mid-morning today, I ventured down to the breakroom for a cup, two quarters in hand to feed the machine. Popped in quarter...the machine spit it right back. Popped it in again...rejected again. Flipped the quarter, re-inserted...nope. Tried the other quarter (even though I need fifty cents for a cup). Nothing doing. Lindsay, who went on this coffee machine field trip with me, tried one quarter and then the other. No luck. "Maybe it's out of water," I speculated. "Maybe the coin bank is full," Lindsay suggested.

I was about to take this as a sign that maybe I should skip the caffeine (I try to keep my consumption down to the equivalent of one cup of coffee per day), when Lindsay noticed that the machine's display said: "FREE VEND." Hmmmm... I selected "Tea or Coffee," popped in my coffee packet of choice, wiggled my environmentally-friendly reusable mug into the proper location, and: coffee!

Now, here comes the fun part. You see, my mug holds 16 ounces of liquid. The coffee machine pisses out an 8-ounce cup per fifty cents, which is probably better for my health but generally makes my cup look pathetically half-full.* So, after my cup was half-filled with caffeinated goodness, we looked back at the display and saw that it still read: "FREE VEND." And why have only half a cup of coffee when you can have twice as much for the same price? So I picked up another packet of the same coffee type (Costa Rica, if you must know) and repeated my free-coffee-getting process. Thereafter, my mug was quite full.

And now, forty-five minutes later, my eyes are quite widely open.

-=-

* Oh, don't get me started here. You know how the optimist sees the glass as half-full and the pessimist sees it as half-empty? I never got that. I always fixated on the "half" rather than the full/empty bit. What kind of optimist sees that a glass is only half full? It's diminishing to the fullness of it all! So when I say something is half-full, there is no happiness or optimism about it at all, trust me.

Karen over at Modern Orthodox Woman put up a post about welcoming and naming ceremonies for baby girls, and it looks like an interesting discussion is shaping up. In my comment over there, I wrote about a Shabbat morning baby naming at Ramath Orah that I was privileged to attend a few years ago:

The father brought his new daughter up to the bima with him for his aliyah (or maybe someone handing him the baby during/after the aliyah; I can't remember). His wife came right up next to the bima on the women's side (down-the-middle mechitza) and bentched gomel. The gabbai added a bit of embellishment to the mi sheberach for the mother and baby, and paused (dramatically, and to verify the name) before stating the little girl's name. After the mi sheberach there was a rousing chorus of mazel tovs followed by the baby's father, the rabbi, and a few other men (I think relatives/close friends) gathering around the baby (still in her father's arms) and singing Y'varechecha and possibly some other song. (This was a few years ago, can you tell?) At kiddush, before the rabbi made kiddush (and therefore before people were all chatting and eating), the mother gave a short speech explaining the meaning behind their daughter's name.

I still think I'd prefer a more private celebration, not a very public Shabbat morning Torah reading naming, but that one was almost enough to make me change my mind. Too bad it could never happen at my current shul.

Karen also asks (and I've heard this sentiment expressed by other mothers) why any woman would voluntarily plan/host a large gathering on the first Friday night following her daughter's birth, to parallel the shalom zachor held for a baby boy on his first Shabbat of life.

While I can see why that would be overwhelming, I also an enthralled by the idea of welcoming any new baby into the Jewish community by filling hir first Shabbat with singing, laughter, sweets, and words of Torah. What could be a more beautiful way to introduce the child to the beauty of Shabbat? (In theory, of course. In reality, any such gathering I've been to has usually consisted either of a large group of community members who barely know the new parents sitting around drinking someone else's alcohol, eating someone else's food, and just generally socializing, or else a small group of close friends chatting with the new parents and helping them decompress after the first few stressful days of their child's life.)

On the flip side, there is an interesting reason given for having a shalom zachor (literally, "greeting the male") and not a corresponding shalom bat ("greeting the daughter") or shalom nekeiva ("greeting the female"). There is a midrash (legend) that the angel Gavriel (I think) teaches the entire Torah to each Jewish child while s/he is still in the womb. Upon birth, Gavriel strikes the child underneath hir nose, causing hir to forget all the Torah s/he learned (and creating that little indentation in our upper lips...and here you thought there was some biological reason for it). As we learn Torah throughout our lives, those "Aha!" moments are symptomatic not of new knowledge, but of remembering what we learned before we were born. A baby girl does not require brit milah (ritual circumcision) to become "complete" and part of the Jewish people; she is born already a part of the covenant (brit) and, in theory, is permitted to begin learning Torah immediately after birth, if she were capable of it. On the other hand, a baby boy does not fully enter into the Jewish people until after his brit milah on the eighth day of his life; no matter how intelligent or developmentally advanced he is, he would not be permitted to learn Torah before then. We hold a shalom zachor for him on the first Shabbat of him life (which, of course, must be before he is eight days old) to help him remember (zachar - a homonym) that he learned something precious in the womb that is currently out of his grasp.

How wonderful for our daughters that we do not deprive them of Torah, not even for the first week of their lives.

Ah, bliss! The Muppet Show theme...in Hebrew.

(Ari B., Julian may just have to kill you for showing me this.)

Hey, does anyone know what happened to Aviel's Netivat Sofrut?