A conversation from yesterday

Him: So, did we get any interesting mail today?
Me: Nah, not really. Two bills, fast-food ads, the next Netflix DVD, and a catalog.
Him: What was the catalog?
Me: I dunno, it was boring. I recycled it.
Him: You don't even remember?
Me: No. I wasn't going to buy anything from it anyway. Go look in the recycling if you really want to see.
He looks in recycling bin. He pulls out catalog. He laughs.
Me: What's so funny?
Him: (holds out fine jewelry catalog, depicting woman dripping with diamonds.) You're a freak of nature for a woman, you know.

What can I say? The Arby's coupons were more interesting! They have beef-and-cheddar on sale and everything... :)

No wonder we're always cold...

Simcha bogarts the heating vents!

Picture post!

Simcha, when he dreams, thinks he's Super-Kitty.

Sandra and David sent us cooking oils. Now we have a whole collection.

Our pretty new winter candle.

Osher lends his expert advice to Jonathan's Excel spreadsheet.




This is the video of the cats exploring their cat castle


For a slideshow of the making and discovery of the cat castle, click here.

What a week

The big news is, we've been looking at houses! Jonathan and I have spent all free time this weekend and last week talking to loan officers, real estate agents, and looking at houses. Sarah, who's from back east but has lived here awhile, has come along with us and been able to ask questions about basements, drywall vs plaster vs brick, and other things that Jonathan and I don't think about. We have another open house today at 3pm, then a few more next weekend.

We've decided to move out of our current neighborhood, because it's only so-so. People here either rent their houses, or inherit their homes and can't afford to maintain them very well. Some streets are really nice, but then other neighboring streets not so much... we've thus decided to live in another area, equally affordable, with much nicer neighborhoods. This new area is 10 minutes away (8 miles) from school, so we're thinking of getting me a scooter for the summer months, and then another car next winter.

Our current lease is up June 30th, but we hope to be able to pick a house by the holidays. It's a perfect buyer's market here, especially before Christmas, and the resale value is good, so when we move out in four or five years we'll be able to get our money back. We like the place we live in now, but we're having problems with our neighbors on the top floor. We can't move out quickly enough!

Lesser news is the fact that since we're getting a "big people" house, we bought an early Hanukkah present for the cats... a cat house/playground. They LOVE it. Pictures will follow shortly. Other news - Thanksgiving was wonderful. We went to Lisa and Tony's, and felt like part of their family. We're now all pumpkin-pied out! School is kicking into finals mode, with all the big projects being assigned. Jonathan's work is in stepping into high gear, he now gets 200-300 work emails daily and it's only going to get worse before it gets better. It's been a steady 40 degrees here. I went to my first brit milah (circumcision ceremony), and thought it was quite beautiful. And we watched Spiderman 3, and it sucked.

The end.

How are all of you?

Ode to (upcoming) winter

You know how in LA there are like ten freeways, all with eight lanes each way with lots of accidents, and it's sunny all the time? Here, not so much. On both counts. The weather report on the radio this morning was longer than the traffic report. I giggled.

I must say, I have been cold lately. This does not bode well for future months. So for the very first time in my life, I went inside a Dick's Sporting Goods store and a Kohl's. I now own fuzzy gloves with "Thinsulate insulation," a snowboarder's hat with a "pull-down face and neck warmer" and a thick North Face jacket. None of these names meant anything to me two days ago, but people at HUC nodded sagely and seemed to know the brands well.

Also in honor of winter, I got motorcycle chaps! They were almost 50% off, and I feel SO much warmer than before. That combined with the beautifully effective $10 silk liners for my gloves, and I'm all set! We took pictures of each of us in our gear... notice my fancy new helmet, which some of you may not have seen before.

Other motorcycle gear pics can be found here.

In non-weather-related news, I feel like we're finally building a real community. Maura and I spent nine hours together today, and we weren't sick of each other (study group gone bad). And last night Jonathan and I hung out with Sarah and Chris, and time flew with them, too - before we knew it it was already midnight, and we still had more to say. Hooray for friends!

Finding religion in Ohio

We were assigned a semester-long project to outline the Torah, and write section summaries. I'm halfway through Genesis. Yay! What a milestone. My goal is to be mostly done by the end of Thanksgiving, so that I don't have to worry about it over finals week.

Thursday night Jonathan and I went over to Carl and Anne's. Anne made this fabulous stew and homemade cake, and we talked about religion for hours on end. Hebrew Bible, Christian scriptures, what makes the canon, C.S. Lewis, Eliade and the sacred and the profane, historiography of Genesis.... I hadn't had a religious conversation that good since I was back in college waxing rhaposdic with Antonio over fuzzy navels. I love intelligent people who aren't afraid to disagree or step outside their paradigm. Jonathan and I were saying in the car on the way home that as much as we like to talk to each *other* about this stuff, we know the other's arguments so well already, it just isn't nearly as much fun.

Yesterday I tried out the breadmaker to see if my last challah was a fluke - and it wasn't! Hooray. You all may be laughing, but hey, a breadmaker still counts as "cooking." My family's never let me forget the time that I helped Gwen make potato kugel when I was a girl... who knew that tablespoons of salt versus teaspoons made such a big difference?!

Let's see... on a whim, Jonathan put kippot and hats on all the lion stuffed animals in our living room. It adds a whole new flavor. The cats were so curious, they jumped up to the top of the bookshelves to see. We actually "lost" Osher for a couple of hours there - he had fallen asleep next to one of the larger lions and blended in!

The cold, by the way, is here. With a vengeance. There was frost on the car this morning, it dropped 20 degrees from last week, and ALL the trees here are beautiful. Why must the cold mean they change color? I'd much rather they just be pretty in spring! I suppose if I have to deal with the close-to-freezing weather, though, at least the scenery is nice.

Now it's off to the motorcycle store. We're going to buy me chaps so my lower half doesn't fall off on the bike. My jacket is plenty warm, but as we discovered on the last trip, plain jeans just don't quite cut it.

Oh! And one last thing. A bunch of HUC students went to the Creation museum I talked about before. From what they said, I'm SO glad I didn't go. I would have been very pissed off at the willful ignorance of the American masses. (Like, there was an exhibit of the Garden of Eden, with a T-Rex sitting by Adam and Eve calmly eating a pineapple. What?!). So by staying home, I've decided, I've saved my faith in humanity.

Dove commercial

Normally I don't put links here, unless they relate to something in my post - but this was too good not to pass on. Everyone watch it NOW. It's less than two minutes.

Campaign for real beauty

Edit: Sigh. I knew Dove's message was too good to be true. Here's a link saying that Dove's parent company also makes Axe, which has really sexist commercials. Figures.

More tidbits, since apparently I can't be bothered to write in paragraphs

- We went to Mongolian BBQ for dinner tonight. The decor exemplified Cincinnati to a tee: a hint of Asian for ethnicity, a bunch of white folks eating... and then two televisions, one showing local sports and the other Nickelodeon.

- Sunday school was David and Goliath. I drew a big face on the board, blindfolded the kids, spun them around, and then had them put a "stone" of blue sticky tac on Goliath's forehead ("Pin the slingshot on Goliath?") It got crazy, but it was fun. The only bad part was when the educator walked in when they were at their most hyper, and told them all to listen to me and give me respect. The educator thought I had lost control (clearly), but I thought everything was fine. Where is the happy medium? A good question to ponder...

- Saturday Jonathan, Carmit and I went over to Carri's. Her baby is adorable. But he, like every other baby in the universe, spits up, pees on things, and gets peas and carrots in his hair. How do human beings survive this messy helpless stage and get to be adults? And how do parents survive the stage of constant dependency?

- National holidays ruin all plans. We were both looking forward to getting our next Netflix in the mail. It took us until 5pm to realize the Post Office was closed for Veteran's Day! You'd think we'd notice these things off the bat.

Now onto pictures:

Osher loves to sleep next to Jonathan's computer when he's working. So we got him a new cat bed. It's perfectly Osher-sized.

But of course he likes to hang out with me too. When he's on the top of my desk he can hear the printer whirr and sleep on nice comfy pillows provided by Savta.

And last but not least..

Jonathan the oh-so-scary Grim Reaper on Halloween!

Metaphor for our lives

Jonathan is 6'1. I'm 5'4. Whenever one of us drives the car after the other, we always have to take a few minutes to adjust the seat and the rearview and side mirrors. When Jonathan gets in the car after me, he has to move the mirrors up. When I get in the car, I have to move them down.

We realized that that describes our relationship, and why we work so well. From my perspective, I think he's always looking at the sky. He thinks I'm always looking at the ground. So we adjust and meet in the middle. :)

Fun things

- Jonathan bought a new motorcycle jacket. He looks hot in it. It's also much safer than the old one, so I'm happy.

- Yesterday I had lunch with an Israeli-born rabbinical student named Carmit. We both cracked up when she ordered her food as Hannah, and I ordered mine as Kate. It triggered immediate bonding over bad mispronunciations of our names.

- I finished Sarah, about... the Biblical Sarah. It was okay, not fantastic. But then again, it was less than $6 at the used bookstore, so I don't feel too badly.

- We got a Scat Mat and put it on the kitchen counter. It gives Osher a teensy tiny shock when he jumps up. His ears are flattened and he keeps hissing at it. Poor kitty. But hopefully he'll learn his lesson; he gets really into drinking from the faucet and we disapprove.

- Gwen still knows me, even though it's been awhile. She sent me a newspaper article that I've saved in a file because I like it so much, and she included an ad for a book that I've already pre-ordered (found here).

- We bought plane tickets for Joe and Nicole's wedding! Yay. Now Jonathan just needs to get fitted for a tux. I'm so envious of men's clothing; they have a tape-measured fitting and they're done. And how long does it take for a woman to buy a dress that looks good and fits her nicely? Waaaaay longer.

Off to school. Sigh. I like my Biblical Grammar teacher, but still... it's Biblical Grammar. At 8am. Four days a week. The registrar is just not nice.

Serious thought of the day

Warning: this is a very rabbinical-student-geek-type entry. Feel free to skip. I don't mean to offend anyone, I'm just thinking out loud.

I believe that we grant "sacredness" and "authenticity" to texts, that they are not intrinsic to them (e.g. I don't believe that sacredness is inherent to the Koran or Christian Testament, though billions of others around the world disagree). I believe that the Torah is sacred because we make it so. But I also attribute its sacredness to its being a whole text that shapes the boundaries of ancient and modern Jewish identity. In fact, I believe that historically, the Bible was formed in order to create a national identity for those returning from the Babylonian exile. When we deconstruct the Bible, we find that different authors incorporate their own ideological elements into different sections. Authorial intent varies practically by chapter and verse. The text loses unity.

So why exactly do Reform Jews consider the Bible sacred?

If it's the traditions that arise from the Torah that make it sacred, the actual halacha and symbols and rituals, then does tearing apart the reasons for those rituals lessen its holiness? In class we learned that putting blood on the doorposts of a house wasn't done solely for Passover, but was in fact an ancient protection rite done every New Year. The Priestly writers appropriated it for their own purposes. It's like Christmas and Hannukah, people appropriating the pagan ritual of a Festival of Lights at the darkest time of the year; they took an already existing ritual and gave it new meaning. Does knowing that make the things in the Bible less holy?

The quality of the sacred can't be attributed to the age of the documents themselves. Many Biblical poems and writings are over 2000 years old, but I don't venerate Egyptian or Sumerian texts that are of equatable age.

It can't be the history that flows from the text either. No matter how much of Tanach is historically accurate, people's belief in the books have inspired actions and created the flow of history. But I don't hold the American Constitution or the Code of Hammurabi sacred, and those have inspired political and historical changes as well.

It can't be the content of the Bible. To be honest, most of the Pentateuch (Gen, Ex, Lev, Num, Deut) after Genesis is really boring, and aside from anthropological curiosity I don't care about sacrifices in the Temple or the sociocultural aspects of life in the 10th or 7th century BCE. In the grand scheme of things Israel was a little backwater. I find Roman, Grecian, and Asian history much more exciting, with their dynasties and life and death and epic gods and goddesses. BUT - even saying all that - ancient Israeli, aka ancient Jewish history, still feels sacred to me.

And maybe that's the key. The Bible tells the story of a people that I consider to be my people, the Jews. Perhaps that assumed identity makes it sacred, no matter the relation of the text to a historical truth. If I believe the evidence of my History and Bible classes, the 12 tribes may not have descended from the same origins, and the story of the matriarchs and patriarchs may have been a historical fiction so that disjointed nomads in one geographical location could feel connected. The Bible can then be considered a collection of disparate texts, redacted for the purpose of nationalist near-propaganda.

Does this mean that the sacred nature of the Bible is torn to shreds, and I am left bereft, with no rock on which to stand? Or can the Torah be sacred because it is unified under an ideology of creating an enduring nationality of Judaism? I want to believe that non-historicity and a meticulous redaction of the Bible with a specific purpose in mind can be amalgamated with a sense of the holy. For if I don't, and the sacred nature of Torah falls, then the sacred nature of Torah-based Mishnah falls. And then the sacred nature of Mishnah-based Talmud. And then the sacred nature of Judaism as I know it today. And then teaching Torah and the concept of klal Yisrael (worldwide Jewish community) falls too. And my love for Judaism becomes very, very convoluted.

Opinions? What do other people think?

Highlights of the week

- Becca taking a Photoshop class, and using pictures of Jonathan and I as test subjects.


- My Wednesday Torah trope study group with Maura and Karen. We sang so badly it became funny.

- Holding Simcha upside down and carrying him to the bathroom to be brushed, with him still trying to bat at his toy along the way.

- Giving out candy to our one lone trick-or-treater, then offering the rest of it to everyone else we know.

- Leading my first morning services at school and not messing up too badly.

- Taking an online "what superhero are you" test, and being told that I'm half- Princess Leia, half-Wonder Woman. Hee.

- Last Sunday's 3rd grade lesson on Ruth and Naomi. For one part of it I covered a sheet with all the crayons in the Sunday school and labeled it "Boaz's field." Then the kids "reaped" the field, leaving the edges for the poor. They really got into it.

- Jonathan's work starting a "Giving Campaign," where they match people's contributions to charity 100%. We're donating part of each paycheck to a no-kill animal shelter.

- Being told that our Rabbinics midterms would be handed back by appointment only, because the learning was what important, not the grade, and the professor wants everybody to have a chance to explain what they got out of the questions.

- Glenna writing a really powerful article for her newspaper, and feeling like "I knew her when."

- Catching my sister online and having a good one-hour webcam session. We usually never get it together enough to webcam, because she's on the army base or the times don't work out.

- Pumpkin pie ice cream and UDF having a "$6 for 2 half-gallons" ice cream sale (United Dairy Farmers, think Thrifty's).

- Fall leaves on trees in Indiana. The leaves on the maple trees turn a Crayola sunshine yellow. It's gorgeous.

- Having it be past our self-imposed limit of November 1st, so tonight for the first time turning on our heat.

- Last but not least, going to my pulpit this weekend and having a congregant tell me that if I was a stock or bond, he'd invest in me. One of the oddest, but coolest, compliments I've ever received.