Random blabbing.

Oy. The High Holidays are barely over, and I'm already feeling behind on schoolwork. I hate that we had so much work assigned over the "break." I'm making a good dent, but not quite there yet.

Yom Kippur went well though! People liked my sermons. I sang Kol Nidre three times. I don't think the tune was perfect, but at least it was consistent. My mom gave me a really simple piece of advice that worked wonders for my voice: open my mouth wider when singing. I think I was able to project a lot more and hit stronger notes.

Xander and Jonathan were the life of the congregational parties, as usual. The best was when Xander came up onto the bima at the end of services, when we were doing Havdalah (blessings that end Shabbat). He climbs behind me, points to the ark and says really loudly - "TO-WAH!" People cracked up. Then he proceeded to point to the shofar blower, hold his hand in a fist in front of his mouth and go, "boo boo!" in his best imitation of the last shofar call. The congregation ate it up with a spoon.

His vocabulary is growing by leaps and bounds, I can't even list the amount of new words he's picked up. But his sense of humor is growing along with it - for example, today Maura handed him a grape, and asked if he could say, "grape." He shook his head no. Jonathan said to her, "R's are hard." So Maura turned back to Xander and said, "Can you say, 'gwape'?" He giggled and said, "Fun-nny!" We all thought it was very funny too. :)

Remember all the trouble we were having with teeth-brushing? Visiting Holly did wonders: I copied what she did with Gregory, and now we ask him whether he wants to go "eee" first or "aah" first, and we brush his teeth accordingly (if that sounds weird, make the sounds in an exaggerated fashion with your mouth open and you see that you get all the teeth that way!)

My World of the Talmud class is increasingly awesome. Today was Roman history in a nutshell. Why do we need to know about the Romans? For interfaith work, when people talk about Jesus, we can't say, "oh, we didn't do it, the Romans did" without understanding a little about their system of law. We can't explain Masada or Bar Kochba or the Maccabees or any other Jewish history without knowing the greater context. We can't lead trips to Israel and talk about many of the sites without knowing where they came from. So today was pure Rome day. Next class will be Jews in the Roman Empire, generally.

In honor of Sukkot, I thought this was really interesting: Sukkah City, NYC 2010. Talk about re-imagining the rules! And in a more controversial subject, this article is about mezuzahs on NY doorways. I don't know, that last woman quoted rubbed me wrong... I feel it's appropriating someone else's religion. What do you all think?

And now, I'm falling over in front of the computer and should get offline... lilah tov.