The fire of Torah

[theyellowhobbit]

Simchat Torah was amazing.


batshua came over to my place for the weekend. She's my first guest ever (in terms of actually staying over. A few people have seen my apartment.) Unfortunately, my living room is very cluttered with stuff that still is not completely unpacked. So I spent the hour before Shabbat running around trying to clear enough space that she could unfold the bed. I was lifting a lot of boxes, "violently" as batshua says. I asked her to move the cuisinart in its box, and she struggled with it, and I was like "it's heavy?" And I picked it up, and it wasn't heavy, and that's when I realized that I still have my archaeological super-strength.

I also have other talents, like setting things on fire. Right before candle-lighting, I realized that I didn't have any matches. But I had a burner. The burner is electric. But I thought maybe if I held the wick to it, it might catch on fire. So the wick was getting singed, but it was not bursting into flame. So I turned up the heat, still with no luck. And then the tea light was getting too hot to hold, so I put on an oven mitt. And then the oven mitt caught on fire, so I said "batshua, can you light a candle from this?" and she did. Then I asked her to turn on the water in the sink, and she did, and I put out the flaming oven mitt. But it was only the top part that was burning and it never got to my fingers. I was fine and we had shiny lit candles. (And I was completely calm through all of this. Had I panicked, I probably wouldn't have thought to light the candle from the mitt...)


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I mashed during davening, and then we ate in the Sukkah. I ended up not having to mash any of dinner.

Then there was a dessert party for everyone who helped out with CJC high holiday services. The dessert was quite good.

Then batshua and I went back to my apartment, and went to sleep.


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I had found out that the kitchen needed to be opened at 9, and I had told levana_b that she needed to come at 9:45. So it was chag when I found out about the 9:00ness, so levana_b couldn't set an alarm. Nor could I for that matter. But I still had my archaeological super-ability to wake up early. I hoped it would work.

I woke up at 4:30ish. I went back to bed and woke up at 7. I went back to bed again, hoping I could wake up in an hour. I woke up at 8:15, with plenty of time to get ready for mashing.

Mashing was uneventful (though there were many cookies), and then I went to CJC and leined the 6th and 7th aliyot. Then I did the chatzi kaddish. Unfortunately, I still had the Yom Kippur mincha chatzi kaddish in my head, so I struggled a bit, even though normally the chatzi kaddish takes no thought.

Lunch was just me, batshua and platypuses. It was really nice and quiet, and deli-roll-ful.

In the afternoon I slept, because I had been feeling dizzy for a while. And then I slept more. And eventually I had to go mash.

Then we had maariv, with the shiny hakafot*. We ran outside into the super-block this year, which hadn't been allowed for the past 2 years. I'm not sure what the original issue was, and whether it had been resolved or we had decided to ignore it. I also did a hakafah with CJC, but most of the time I was with OCP. The OCP hakafot are much more energetic, since there are more people, and they have a lot more songs, and they last longer. By the end I was exhausted. I cut the line to get food, since I had to mash for all of dinner. But it wasn't so bad, and I got to have a really good conversation with a visiting friend.

I couldn't find batshua when I got out (at 1am) and eventually gave up and went back to my room. And then she came back, and she was fine. It was 2ish when I fell asleep.


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I had to mash again, so I woke up early again. I love that I can do that.

There were no cookies at mashing today, and I had very little to eat beforehand, so by the time I went up for the hakafot, I was already feeling dead. I danced for the entire time, except for the songs where I was shooting arigi, A.A. and A.B. with the water-gun levana_b gave me. I was the only one on the girl's side with a water gun. But I think I did a good job. (Well, you all got wet, didn't you?) Rachel:3, Guys:0.

Then we had women's torah reading. I had practiced my leining with perseus_remus's shiny high holiday trop, which was a bit hard to do considering I already knew it in less shiny high-holiday trop. But I got it in the end, and did a good job, and was once again the only one doing high holiday trop.

Lunch was nice, and we actually had enough food, despite my fears (I had been really stressed and overextended when I was assigning people stuff, and a lot of people couldn't cook, and a lot of people were guests, so I had never assigned dessert or salad. 706 and 712 saved the day.)

We hung out in 706 after lunch, and were singing a bunch of random songs. Then we went to mincha, and I read Kedma (The student-created/run Journal of Jewish Thought [And Israel] that we have at Penn) for a bit and then we went up for ma'ariv, which I skipped, and I gave batshua a massage, since I'm that nice.


That's it. I'll write a thesis update now.

*Hakafa (pl. Hakafot) A circle of dancing. Basically people are called up to get the torahs, and then we all join hands in a circle and dance around them and sing a bunch of songs. There are 7 hakafot at night and 7 in the morning.