Shabbat and Motzei Shabbat

[theyellowhobbit]

I didn't die a papery death. I submitted my paper online at 11:25am on Friday, and made the 11:25 (11:28 in this case) bus to campus for my 12:00 appointment. The paper even had some proofreading. It would have had more if I had had my act together. But I did not have my act together. But I did get to look at it myself. And it was supposed to be 2-2.5 pages and it was 3 pages. Oh well.

I took the last possible bus to campus before Shabbat. I brought my bag of mukhtza¹ things with me and stored them in the closet where SCM's fridge is so I could get them after Shabbat. I also was early enough that I could learn my leining ² and practice psukei³ for a bit.

Then there were services. Afterwards, MZ and I were going to go to Chabad for dinner, since it was free and MZ said they were starting at 7. When we got there at 7 they were still in the middle of services. I realized if I stayed there I would have no time to eat before I had to leave at 7:45. So I went back to Hillel and was able to get into dinner and eat an entire meal.

After that was the Noteables⁴ performance, for which I had gotten a ticket ahead of time and permission from Rabbi Ethan to attend. Even so, I did feel a bit uncomfortable because they had a pianist, and because of the whole spirit of Shabbat thing. But they had no microphones and no other instruments and the piano wasn't the main focus. (Note: I do not feel like getting into a halachic debate in the form of a flame war with anyone about this, and if it starts happening then I will screen comments or something.)

The concert was pretty good (especially considering their pianist had injured herself last week and they needed to find replacements at the last minute). There were many entertaining songs. I wished R.G. had been in one of the small ensemble pieces, and when I asked her about it afterwards, she said she wasn't in one because SCM ate up her life when Noteables wasn't eating it up. Makes sense.

Then there was gaming, which ended up being tiny since the Noteables stayed in their own party and didn't join us.

I was staying with EY and landofnowhere except that the former was still at the Noteables party, and the latter was back in her room already. So as we were delivering games to the room where the Noteables party was, we ran into EY. Since she still wanted to stay for a bit, we ended up devising the plan that I would chill with brokenwndw until EY was ready to pick me up.

And lo, and behold, the brilliant plan worked. And I managed to get some sleep, too!

(Meanwhile, had I not given my bag of clothes to landofnowhere in the first place, I probably could have stayed elsewhere, such as on brokenwndw's extra futon. But the plan made a lot of sense at the time, and it made me not have to carry my bag everywhere.)

And then I woke up for psukei, which started at 9:30. Psukei is a weird service in that they don't find people in advance to lead it, but its led by whoever shows up and wants to do it. In this case, though, I had learned the nuisach from IC this week and RG knew that I wanted to lead psukei, so there I was unofficially leading it. I thought if I were late, perhaps someone would have already started leading it. I got there at 9:32, and only JM was there, and thus psukei was mine.

Of course, for most of the service it was just him, DW and me. Which meant that I couldn't really sing things, especially "eilu finu" which has 3 part harmonies and requires at least 3 people who know it, and only DW and I knew it. But I did manage to pull off the whole psalm 146 to the tune of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. (Looking at the text of the psalm, I realize that the first verse of the song has a line break in verse 4 of the text, and thus the song breaks it up in a not-so-sensical way. But that's how the words fit to the music. And the rest of it works. I'm sure this would annoy elfsdh but he was at Tremont.)

But Psukei still is really pretty. I wish I had known this awesome nuisach while I was still at Penn. I would have been a lot more happy to lead psukei, even when CJC didn't let me sing things.

Then was shacharit, which I left to go outside and practice my leining. We didn't have a minyan⁵ by the time it was over and we were supposed to be doing Torah reading. So we did the d'var Torah⁶. Still no minyan. So then we did musaf, which is supposed to come after the Torah reading. Still no minyan. We were almost ready to give up and eat kiddush, but then we found someone. Which is good except for the part where my stomach started to hurt from lack of food, but I couldn't leave the room because then we wouldn't have a minyan.

Compounding the previous situation was that one person in the room didn't count (not sure why, RG just told me quietly.) So we were trying to be all quiet about the fact that there were 10 people in the room and only 9 counted, but then there was this woman who kept on being like "aren't there 10 people here? Don't we have a minyan?" etc. So much for subtlety.

And then we finally finished and I got to eat food. I hung out for a bit afterwards because I was afraid of getting to lunch early and being stuck outside.

Turns out that it ended up happening that way anyways, but due to my own stupidity. I got there around 1:15, and no one came in or came down for me and I assumed they were still at services (elsewhere). It turns out that the door was open-able. I ended up getting in through someone else exiting, and when I got to the apartment, lunch had already started. Luckily they saved me wine for kiddush (muscato!) and challah for motzei. And they had only started eating 10 minutes ago. And the food was good and it was a good group of people. There were only 8 of us.

After lunch, some of us went back to Harvard Hillel. Shabbat was almost over at this point. So I went upstairs and they were singing. And then Shabbat was over and we had ma'ariv, and thus ended Shabbat. Either R.G. or M. opened up the magical closet which contained my magical bag of mukhtza things (and at this point my not so magical bag of non-mukhtza things as well).

I ended up just staying on campus, since we were seeing the Golden Compass at 6:30 ("we" here = a huge group of HRSFAns.) There was a bit of confusion on my part, but luckily KC called me and clarified, and then I ran from Lamont Library to the T stop and everyone was there and we caught the inbound train, and we got to the theater with plenty of time to spare.

I enjoyed the movie, but I had never read the book. Apparently they did such things as cutting off the last 2 chapters, switching book 2 and book 3, getting rid of characters and assigning their roles to existing characters, and keeping dialogue intact but assigning it to different people. I obviously did not pick up on this.

And after that was Milk and Cookies. I hadn't prepared anything and we were having a few breaks where people were like "story?" so I decided to go to the internet. I was hoping to find an Etgar Keret story online, but alas didn't see one in my initial search. The Bus Driver who Wanted to be God was on Google books, but they omitted pages such that there were no complete stories there.

So I decided to tell one of my midrashim from long ago. The problem with my midrashim is that they have a lot of inside jokes relevant to Penn. But the Judah and Tamar one was understandable enough, though I had to explain what deli-roll was and translate some Yeshivish terms I had used. That and I used a lot of biblical verses without modernizing the language. I think I need to go back to writing midrashim, perhaps with more modern language and inside jokes that HRSFAns can get. I was thinking about doing one on the 10 commandments a while back, but it never happened.

(Afterwards, kat_ravensong said "There's bible fanfic?!?!?!" Yes, there certainly is. It's a tradition over 2000 years old, mostly written by rabbis, and it's called "midrash.")

I wish I could have told Rabbi Ethan's Channukah story, but alas, I don't have it. And I wouldn't have been as good at telling it as he was. But it is an amazing story.

And then I went home. I missed the 12:15 bus by 5 seconds, so I hung out in the science center until it was time to go outside and wait for the 12:45 bus. Then I got home, attempted to write this entry, was too tired to do so, and went to bed.


And in case you're wondering: the myriad of footnotes I have today are for the benefit of anyone in the Great HRSFAn LJ network who I've recently added, since I speak a lot of Jewish, and many of you guys don't speak as much Jewish as I do, if any at all. I don't define everything because I'm too lazy. Some day I'll make a glossary and link to it in my profile. Until then, there's wikipedia.


¹"mukhtza" means things that you can't touch/carry/use on Shabbat because they have no purpose on Shabbat, and touching or carrying them might led to using them (either intentionally of unintentionally.) Examples of mukhtza things are money, my Charlie card, writing implements, etc. I'm not sure what the word "mukhtza" actually translates to.
²Torah reading
³Psukei d'zimra is the very first service in the morning. Literally meaning "verses of song." Though most people dislike psukei and don't sing it and try to get through it as fast as possible.
⁴A Harvard group that performs Broadway showtunes once a semester. Their concerts are always on Friday nights. Oh, and almost all of HRSFA is in Noteables, and most of the Noteables are HRSFAns. And R.G., one of the SCM gabbaim, is also a Noteable. So I wanted to go to support everyone. Hence me asking for rabbinical permission rather than just assuming I couldn't go.
⁵quorum of 10 men/people. You need 10 men/people in order to say certain prayers, and in order to read the Torah from the scroll. The whole "men/people" thing depends on whether or not you're egalitarian. Egal Jews count adult Jewish men and women. Non-egal Jews only count adult Jewish males. We're an egalitarian minyan. (Minyan also can mean the group that prays together in a more general sense. So SCM = Student Conservative Minyan.)
⁶sermon

Comments

[dr_whom]

Footnote 4: Aw, tosh. Noteables concerts are on Friday nights about half the time. The number of times in the past several years that the Noteables concert has been on Saturday night and I've had a Shakespeare Cafe to rush back to in Philly on Sunday afternoon has been too many for my satisfaction.

[sen-ichi-rei.livejournal.com]

According to RG they only perform on Fridays. She's a sophomore though, so would not have performed in as many noteables concerts as you have attended. Maybe once upon a time they were on Saturday nights...

[dr_whom]

I haven't been to any of the last three main Noteables concerts. (I basically decided that once everyone who had been in the group at the same time as me had graduated, it was time for me to stop making a special trip all the way from Philly to Boston for it.) But the last one I went to—the 15th anniversary show, spring '06—was on a Saturday night, and I was very miffed about having to leave Boston at 6am to make it back to Philly in time for the Cafe.