I haven’t written a parsha post in a while, but Jewish Side requested the category of parsha on my blog in the link challenge I proposed last week. So, Bahalotcha, here we come — (if you live in Israel, you must be an expert on this parsha by now, as you heard it last Shabbat).
In this parsha we learn a lot about the Levi’im (Levites) and the roles they played in the mishkan. (Pop quiz: what did a Levi do between the ages of 25 – 30?) Curiously, however, the parsha does not mention the Levi’im singing. I asked my husband about this, and he said the singing Levi’im must be part of Torah sheBa’al Peh, the Oral Law. He thought there was a hint of it when the parsha says the Levi’im worked the burdensome work up to age 50, at which point they only did the less cumbersome tasks (and one assumes this would be singing – see Numbers 4:47). I did a search on the web and found this about sources of Levi’im singing in the Torah on the Darche Noam website. FYI, my boys and my husband are Levi’im.
On a somewhat related topic, Rabbi Abraham Twerski explains why the tribe of Dan was last. While the Levi’im were up in front carry their parts of the Mishkan, Dan was put at the back. Why? Rashi says their job was to pick up stragglers and lost objects. Here’s a story that Rabbi Twerski relates to explain:
A European Jew consulted his rabbi. His son, who had deviated from Torah observance, had emigrated to America. he became successful in business and was sending his father money. However, since the son was not shomer Shabbos (observant of Shabbos), the father was reluctant to take money which may have been earned on Shabbos.
The rabbi said, “It is unfortunate that your son has dropped observance of the mitzvos. The one mitzvah he is still observing is honoring his father. We may hope that observance of this great mitzvah may have an influence on him to observe other mitzvos. If you refuse the money, you will be depriving him of an important mitzvah.”
Rabbi Twerski explains that Dan was the weakest of the tribes, the one that still had idol worshippers and produced King Yeravam, who caused the secession of the ten tribes. So Dan is somewhat like the wayward son in America. Dan’s good role was in picking up objects and returning them to their owners, and perhaps by doing these mitzvot they would eventually return to being loyal to God. Sometimes doing a mitzvah for a fellow human being can bring one to be closer to God, as well.
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Which brings me to my final topic: Jewish Side, who you can follow on Twitter @Jewish_Side, is looking for her first “real” job post college. She wrote her resume, and she asks, what next? If you have any job hunting tips, you are welcome to leave them in the comments or via Twitter (do @Jewish_Side and whatever you have to say).
Note: this is the first of in series of those who take my link challenge. I was going to do a more light-hearted post for the first one, but I got news that my friend Rick Black’s father died on Sunday. So this one is for G6 and Rick Black.
I remember vividly walking home from the hospital in utter desolation after his petirah, feeling like my world was so very dark, that I would never learn another thing ever again — how would I smile and laugh again?
How I wish somebody could have come up to me at that very moment and taken me by my shoulders, looked in to my eyes and said….. “SEVEN YEARS FROM THIS VERY DAY you will be sitting at your Shabbos table, surrounded by your entire family, which will include a new son in law, a new daughter in law and you will be cradling your brand new granddaughter in your arms on her very first Shabbos, as everyone at the table sings zemiros and learns in your father’s memory. Your granddaughter will be given her Jewish name on this very day seven years from now.
Please leave comments for her on her post. So beautiful how she savors her father’s memory and connects it to her current family joy.
*petirah = death
• • •
An interview of a son with his father
Rick Black interviewed his father over the past two years. An excerpt from those interviews is on the Jewish Writing Project blog, spoken in his father’s voice:
I was bar mitzvahed in a very small shul – the one on Lake Street. We didn’t make much of it. It was just a small bar mitzvah for our family. I davaned Saturday morning for the service, Shacharis and Musaf, and when they took the Torah out of the ark, I had to sing the “Shema” and my voice broke, and a kid from Hebrew school said, “You alright?”
Another piece of the interview, where Rick’s father befriends Max the Russian:
So, this fella’s name was Max Bregoff and I met him. He was a tough Russian. I introduced him to a lot of my friends who were members of the club and we made him a member of the club, too. We called him the mad Russian. He used to get very angry. He’d spit at them. He was a tough hombre but he found the American way and he was able to live a good life and enjoy himself. He spent a lot of time at the Jewish Center. Yes, he did find the American way and he became a friend.
Read Growing Up Jewish, an interview of David Black by his son Rick Black.
Rick, may you be comforted among the mourners of Israel; may we all know simchas (happy occasions) like the one G6 describes, of a happy, healthy family singing and enjoying together.
Additional Note: I spoke to a friend (not Jewish) here in Highland Park who asked questions about making a shiva call. Topic for another time, explaining a shiva call – do’s and don’ts, the halachot (laws) and the customs. If anyone has suggestions for explaining a shiva call, please feel free to comment. I told my friend that the mourner is supposed to do the talking; the mourner should take the lead in the topic of conversation.
This post is less of a recipe and more of a discussion on what to eat on Shabbat that is warm. Klara, who lives near Jerusalem, came to visit me a few weeks ago. I like to learn about macrobiotics from her, even if I only eat a few of the recipes (but I learn from the discussions). We were discussing warm food on Shabbat.
It is customary for observant Jews to eat something warm on Shabbat; this is because even though we have the prohibition not to cook or to light a fire, we should still show don’t need to eat cold food. Or sit in the dark. The traditional warm Shabbat food that Ashkenazi Jews eat is chulent (see Ilana-Davita‘s and Lion of Zion‘s posts); Sephardim (Jews that were originally in Spain) eat dafina or chamin.
I prefer not to eat chulent, as I find it too heavy a food. So I have a tendency to make lots of salads, and I greatly enjoy those. However, in the middle of this winter I noticed that the food that we had warm on Shabbat was mostly chulent and potato kugel, neither of which are my favorite food. I do sometimes eat a bit of chicken warm. So I started warming up beans cooked with turmeric and other curried flavors. But I really wasn’t in the mood for the beans.
Back to my discussion with Klara: Klara felt that in keeping with macrobiotic teaching, food on Shabbat should be warm. I think there is a conflict here, as macrobiotics seem to suggest food should be eaten warm AND right away (not left on a blech or warming tray for 4 hours). And I wonder how many nutrients a salad-like food such as kale has after 4 hours of re-warming.
My conversation with Klara did spur me on to find this one dish that I liked re-warmed on Shabbat. It is simply mushrooms, onions and something green sauteed in a bit of olive oil.
Ingredients:
1 tsp. olive oil
1 onion
2 boxes of mushrooms, preferably baby bella because they are “meaty”
a green: parsley, basil, kale, collards, thyme, sage – I used a bit of broccoli rabe
Warm a bit of olive oil. Chop the onion, mushrooms (into slices) and greens (into bits). Saute the onion until translucent. Add the mushrooms. When the mushrooms begin to soften, add your chopped greens. If you don’t add the chopped greens, the recipe will be fine without it. Put it in a small casserole dish (covered) so it can be reheated on Shabbat.
Alternative: use Ilana-Davita’s mushroom recipe. She suggests serving it cold, but if you are in the mood for a warm mushroom dish for your Shabbat meal, this one might work.
Purple Iris, photographed in May 2009
Since I don’t have to craft a full post (I would love to write a tech, business or even a recipe), I present an iris and these “postalinas” (mini one sentence posts):
Working on a new, free online course with Professor Roni Stauber for the Rutgers Bildner Center on the History of Zionism.
Discovered a great post on Drupal vs. WordPress. And yes, I still want to develop expertise in both Drupal and WordPress. I will be working soon on converting a regular HTML website to WordPress so the small business owner can manage his own site.
Have a recipe for onions and mushrooms that is so simple but so delicious. Maybe next week I’ll post it?
Planning an exciting Nature Notes post for Thursday, courtesy of an email I got from Klara.
Which of these postalinas have meaning for you? Do you like the term ‘postalina’?
What do blooming garden flowers and the shocker I used for a title have in common?
In S. Y. Agnon’s short story “The Sign” the main character learns that all the Jews in his hometown in Europe have been killed by the Nazis. He learns this at the same time his house in the Land of Israel has been decorated for Shavuot in the traditional way, with flowers and plants:
The sun shone down on the outside of the house; inside, on the walls, we had hung cypress, pine, and laurel branches, and flowers. Each beautiful flower and everything with a sweet smell and been brought in to decorate the house for the holiday of Shavuot. In all the days I had lived in the Land of Israel, our house had never been decorated so nicely as it was that day. All the flaws in the house had vanished, and not a crack was to be seen, either in the ceiling or in the walls. From the places where the cracks in the house used to gape with open mouths and laugh at the builders, there came instead the pleasant smell of branches and shrubs, and especially of the flowers we had brought from our garden. These humble creatures, which because of their great modesty don’t raise themselves high above the ground except to give off their good smell, made the eye rejoice because of the many colors with which the Holy One, blessed be He, has decorated them, to glorify His land, which, in His loving-kindness, He has given to us.
A little later in the story Agnon teaches us a little of the halachot (laws) of Shavuot:
Although on the Sabbath and festivals one says the evening prayers early, on Shavuot we wait to say Maariv until the stars are out.
For if we were to pray early and recieve the holiness of the festival, we would be shortening the days of the Omer, and the Torah said, “There shall be seven full weeks.”
Later, the main character is standing in the synagogue, facing the six memorial candles shining among the roses and the wildflowers and the garden flowers that have been used to decorate the sanctuary. “Is it possible that a city full of Torah and life is suddenly uprooted from the world, and all its people—old and young; men, women and children—are killed, that now the city is silent, with not a soul of Israel left in it?”
Who is S. Y. Agnon? Shmuel Yosef Agnon was born Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes in Buczacz, Galicia. In 1908 he immigrated to Israel and in 1913 he went to Germany, where he married his wife. He returned to Israel in 1924. If you have heard of Saul Bellow or Isaac Bashevis Singer, S. Y. Agnon won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966, years before Saul Bellow and Isaac Bashevis Singer won their Nobel Prizes. Agnon wrote his stories in Hebrew, one of the first modern writers to do so. I hope one day to read his stories in Hebrew, as one loses a lot in translation.
Many thanks to Lorri (Rayna Elianna) for recommending A Book That Was Lost: Thirty Five Stories (Hebrew Classics),a lovely book of short stories. The holiday of Shavuot, which is a major Jewish holiday (as opposed to say, Chanukah, which is only a minor holiday) begins on Thursday night, May 28th. It is traditional to decorate one’s home with flowers, to stay up all night learning Torah, and to eat dairy dishes (we’ll be having ice cream for dessert).
Upcoming in Highland Park: Memorial Day Parade down Raritan Avenue (starts in New Brunswick – Highland Park scouts and teams start at South Adelaide) – See Memorial Day Parade 2008
Elsewhere on the Web
Ilana-Davita is taking the Trep challenge and walking. I’ve been doing gardening as exercise, so Ilana-Davita asks if it hurts my back? Links on digging without backache:
I think the key is I never spend more than ten minutes at a time gardening. I do it in between everything else. Am I holding the spade properly? I have no idea. I just noticed both those links are from the UK; is it because more UK folks are gardeners?
Deep Vein Thrombosis – one of the causes is sitting too long in one spot, like on a plane (I know someone who had similar problems after returning from Israel – get up and walk around on a long plane ride).
Wall of the Old City, Jerusalem, July 2008
Fifty years ago Jews could not walk here, along the walls of the Old City. There was a barbed wire fence preventing entrance. In 1967 all this changed, and thus tonight begins Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day. After June 1967 not only were Jews and others allowed into the Old City and to visit the Kotel, the City was once again in Jewish control, as it had not been for 2000 years. Jerusalem has been a holy city for the Jewish People since the time of King David.
From Wikipedia, here is what Moshe Dayan said on that day:
This morning, the Israel Defense Forces liberated Jerusalem. We have united Jerusalem, the divided capital of Israel. We have returned to the holiest of our holy places, never to part from it again. To our Arab neighbors we extend, also at this hour—and with added emphasis at this hour—our hand in peace. And to our Christian and Muslim fellow citizens, we solemnly promise full religious freedom and rights. We did not come to Jerusalem for the sake of other peoples’ holy places, and not to interfere with the adherents of other faiths, but in order to safeguard its entirety, and to live there together with others, in unity.
Posts on Jerusalem Day or about Jerusalem in the news:
Jack hosts this week’s Haveil Havalim, the weekly blog carnival of the Jewish Blogosphere. He compares Haveil Havalim to the famous scene from Night at the Opera, when Harpo, Chico, Groucho and too many others crowd into an ocean liner cabin.
And I updated my Pics of the Month page. The page features some of my favorite paintings, photos or Flash creations. Featured in this post is a watercolor I did in 2007. Any ideas why I chose it for this post?
My son (the middle son, the filmmaker) went on a field trip last week with his class to the Rutgers Agricultural Museum in New Brunswick. Here is an old-fashioned firetruck that he photographed. (I didn’t go on the trip; he took his own camera).
Part of the reason for the trip was the boys have been studying the 39 Melachot, the 39 acts of work that a Jew is not allowed to do on the Sabbath. All of these Melachot are agriculturally-based, so their teacher used the museum as a way to show them threshing, winnowing, grinding sheaves (I have no idea what those are; I took those words off Wikipedia). Each boy had been assigned one Melacha to study in detail.
My son’s Melacha was weaving. He had already presented to the class, and his teacher told me later that he gave my son weaving because it was a more difficult one, but he knew my son could handle it. He did an origami basket project with his class. Yes, I am proud of him!
