The corners of our fields

Leviticus 19:9] When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap all the way to the edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. 10] You shall not pick your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen fruit of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger: I the Eternal am your God.

Plaut commentary: This passage (and its parallels) is not an appeal to the landowners' generosity. It confers the right to glean and to harvest the uncut edge on those who have no resources of their own. It is perhaps the oldest declaration that the disadvantaged members of a society have a right to support from that society. They should not be dependent on voluntary benevolence alone -- though the latter is constantly stressed as well.

Anath's comment: And so many people who would use Leviticus to deprive certain people of their civil rights will also insist that the poor, the homeless, the mentally ill are blights on our society who have no right to assistance. . . read a little further from your pet chapter and verse, folks.

I wasn't looking for this...

There is an answer to the doctor's question. All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes - all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God's Earth.

The ending narration to Deaths-Head Revisited.

Some identifiers

I decided I'm relying overly on initials and vague descriptors to identify people in my Jewish life, so I'm going to shift some things around a bit. Here is my new plan; none of these are actual names or initials of those involved, and yes, our synagogue has four rabbis and a cantor:

My spouse: Chai

My best friend: Tav

My sponsoring rabbi: Rabbi T

The rabbi who's about my age: Rabbi G

The rabbi a little younger than me who's leaving soon: Rabbi L

The senior rabbi: Rabbi P

The cantor: Cantor (that one was easy)

We'll be getting a new rabbi soon; I do know who it is, but I don't know him yet, and I can't remember his last name, so I'll give him an initial when warranted.

Oh hey

It's been a while, hasn't it?

Short form news:

1) I converted. I have my Jew license and everything.

2) C and I are getting remarried Jewishly in a couple weeks.

I have plenty to say about both, but I figure a brief recap will suffice for now.

Completely out of season

In going through a Random Pile O' Stuff, I found this paragraph. I'm not sure where it came from, since it looks like it was cut out of a larger piece of paper, and I don't remember having seen it before. I also can't credit it. It has to do with Tashlich, the Jewish custom practiced on Rosh Hashanah afternoon of casting our sins away in the form of throwing bread into a moving body of water.

"Each quality, even those that seem bad, contributed somehow to our self-preservation. It had a good life-affirming purpose at one point, even this that is now no longer true. In order to let go of such a habit, I need to give it a 'testimonal' to send it away with my thanks. 'I needed you, and there you were, and I thank you for it. And now, with full appreciation, I know that I no longer need you and I can send you away.' This is different from trying to stamp it out. We no longer say, 'I'm sorry I did this. I'm throwing that behavior away.' We say, 'Thank you, God, for this gift. I needed it then; I no longer need it now. I am returning it to the universe in the hope that it can help generate life elsewhere as it did for me.' And this needs to be true for all the things we want to say good-bye to at Tashlikh. This is what we mean by biodegradable."

I suppose one hardly needs to wait for Tashlich for this, and I suppose Pesach is also a particularly good time to think of those habits and ways of thinking which we could stand to cast off. And considering shedding those habits as regifting rather than destroying may come in great use.

Baruch who? Aror who?

This is the first year we've actually celebrated Purim. While we did not get too drunk to differentiate between Mordechai and Haman (and there's an intriguing analysis of that mitzvah here), we did go to the PurimShpiel at our synagogue. Although I was slightly disappointed that this year did not feature rabbis cross-dressing, I enjoyed the improv troupe they had instead. Also free snacks. Afterwards, we went out for sushi with several friends, and our conversation devolved into "making beef stroganoff" as a euphemism for other activities.

This is probably why the rabbis who taught our Intro to Judaism class recommended Purim or Chanukah rather than the High Holy Days as one's first Jewish holiday. Oops.

Helpful Hint

I was talking to my friend Esther about my anxiety concerning the Beit Din, and she said, "If they ask you what Jewish person you most admire, just don't say Jesus Christ. Otherwise, you can't really screw up a Beit Din."