1. IT USED TO BE CALLED “doing the marketing.” And it is one of my life’s favorite small pleasures.
2. This simple joy can probably be traced back to my dad and I doing it together every Saturday or Sunday morning (or so goes my memory), when I was a young’un in Massachusetts. We would visit one store for meat, another for produce, another for household products, yet another for baked goods.
So: We’re at CVS just now, about an hour after I wrote “And On, And On,”, waiting our turn at the pharmacy, when this woman sits down next to me and says, “I’m very sorry about what happened in Pittsburgh.” (This, after she circled around where we were sitting in what I had assumed was a somewhat suspicious manner.)
We talked a few minutes about what happened and why; she asked me about the Sonoma Jewish community, told me her feelings about the current White House occupant, and couldn’t have been nicer or more compassionate.
Sometimes, it pays to wear a yarmulke.
“Am Yisrael Chai” – The People Israel Live!
The eleven Jews murdered yesterday as they worshiped at the Tree of Life Congregation near Pittsburgh could be found in any synagogue, including my own: the former congregational president, the lay leader, the man with the famously dry wit, the shofar (ram’s horn) blower; the ones everybody loved and could depend on.
It could have been any of us. And in a sense, it was.
KING A translation of the Hebrew word “melech” (מלך), this Name has fallen out of favor in Liberal Judaism circles due to two factors: 1) It’s male-gendered, and thus anthro/patriomorphic (and conceptually inaccurate); and 2) as people who live in a democratic republic, we’ve lost touch of what being a king entails: his word is law, he submits to no one, and he wields the power of life and death over his subjects. Since the word “melech” is present in all classical Jewish blessings and in many prayers, some Liberal siddurim (prayerbooks) substitute “Sovereign,” others “Source.” As my first philosophy professor was wont to say, “You pays your money, you takes your choice.”
THIS IS THE BOOK THAT inspired me to cook for myself. It demystified for me the cooking process, shored up my nascent resolve, and gave me the mental tools I needed to commit the revolutionary act of not settling for or eating processed food anymore (aside from cheese, bread, and other fermented eatables, of course). It also contains, as Chapter 12, the greatest food essay ever written, which — as I have noted elseblog — adjures you to call upon your inner chef to arise when you’re sick of cooking. (No mean feat, that.)
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”
― Isaac Asimov
IF YOU STUDY ANYTHING, AS the salesman sang in the opening scene of “The Music Man,” “You’ve got to know the territory.”
Case in point: Every Wednesday morning for the past few years, I have conducted an hour-long living-room learning session we’ve come to call “Text Study,” which has included in-depth forays through the Bible’s early prophetic books, Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, and currently, the Book of Psalms.
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