Friday night we spent with Rina's cousin Tammy and her family. The conversation was lively, the kids adorable and playful, and the food fantastic (is there some weird Cult of the Kitchen in the Tenenbaum family?). We felt right at home, playing on the floor with the kids (Jon learned the most popular Israeli school game, a weird card game left over from 1920) and recapping our lives to this point. It was a great way to spend the start of Shabbat.
This morning we tried out what we'd heard to be a great minyan. The organization is halachically progressive and meets once a month, usually in a member's home. This weekend was their first in a new location*, which they'd moved to to celebrate a Shabbat Chatan v'Kallah. Once again Jon was underwhelmed, but Rina wants to give them another try. The individual who invited them to the club-meeting called it "shorter and sweeter than Shirah Hadashah", which responded to our likes and dislikes exactly, but the service wound up taking just as long, with extended pauses for procedural issues, and had almost no singing. This being our third trip to a minyan of this sort, of which we liked only one, Jon is reminded once again of the statement made by Richard Dawkins, that "organizing atheists is like herding cats" - by nature religious innovators stray from the norm and prefer to be individuals, making institutionalization difficult.
After Shabbat we got a lift from Tammy and Uli to a Tenenbaum Bar Mitzvah in Tel Aviv. While we knew only a portion of the guests, the event was a lot of fun. We got to meet some family for the first time, reconnect with others, and dance some crazy circle dances.
*Of limited interest to some of you may be that the new location is inside the Goldtein Youth Village, the home of both Ramah Seminar and TRY. When I remarked that it was the same as when I visited 10 years ago, someone nearby responded that it is the same as it was 20 years ago. I mean, with wood panelling like that you have to be in either a basement or a camp, nowhere else.
3 comments:
Is there something more you would like to say about basements with wood paneling? Some of your finest possessions are now being stored in a basement with wood paneling. Eh?
by any chance, was the game a crazy driving game with speed limits and gas tanks? (I know it as mille bourne, but it has an israeli heritage as well, so I hear).
In response to BC - I didn't disparage the paneling, just pointed it out, and what makes you think that we would trust you with our finest possessions, anyway?
In response to rachel - no, the game involved bent soccer cards, and you had to flip them over by clapping near them or blowing on them. Couldn't they at least have been battery operated playing cards?
Post a Comment