Jewish Musings, Thursday, August 24, 2023

[peachymom1]

What’s on your mind — how to make kugel? This week’s Torah reading? Life goals? Prayer? We are all engaged in weight loss/weight maintenance journeys and we are all Jewish or at least interested in Judaism. We like to eat, we like to discuss. It is our goal here to provide each other support on our journeys, to share experiences, to call on our rich cultural heritage and texts, and to help each other grow spiritually.

Some of us take weekly turns starting the thread:

Holly
Lee
Louise
Lynne
Peachy

And for those of you that stop by to read this thread without posting — you are welcome to, but you are also welcome to chime in. Don’t be shy!

[peachymom1]

Hello everyone, I am on complete overload.

Our beloved ritual director called me yesterday to confirm my Torah readings for the next x-number of weeks. I’m reading three aliyot this Shabbat (Ki Tetzei), two the following Shabbat (Ki Tisa) and four the following week (Nitzavim). Then it’s Rosh Hashanah, and I’m reading only on the first day this year. I’m also reading Torah once on Yom Kippur, two aliyot the first and second days of Sukkot, along with part of the haftarah for the first day of Sukkot, then reading Torah on Shmini Atzeret and Simchat Torah. That’s a lot of Torah reading. The holiday readings are easy; I’ve done them all many times and hardly need to practice. It’s the ones in the next few weeks that are more difficult. I’ve done them all before too, but it still takes a lot of time to practice and prepare.

I don’t mind the time and the practice. What I do mind is when the cantor doesn’t give the ritual director adequate time to line up Torah readers, or she’s not sure whether someone will show up, blah-blah-blah. She (the cantor) has a thousand excuses and apologizes a thousand times, but she keeps doing this, and the readings I’m doing between now and Rosh Hashanah were hastily assigned to me because she didn’t have her act together and didn’t finalize things with other readers. The ritual director, God bless him, finally got tough with the cantor and told her that if she didn’t give him at least a month to find Torah readers for any given Shabbat, he wasn’t going to help her anymore, and she would have to find her own Torah readers or chant the aliyot herself. The cantor is a lovely person, and I don’t think she’s deliberately trying to stress us out, but that’s the end result.

So that’s where I am with High Holiday prep. There’s a family we always invite for R.H. dinner, and I haven’t even called the mom yet. I need to do that today. On top of all that, I completely wrecked my eating this week and am having trouble getting back on track. Also, DH’s birthday is in a couple of days, and I forgot to order his favorite cake (luckily, I can still do that in time if I hurry). And this is my last week of saying Kaddish for my mother, which feels strange to me. I rarely feel like saying to the whole world, “Fine, you got me! I give up!” But that’s how I feel right now. Ugh!

Does anyone have any words of wisdom to help me yank myself back into a reasonable frame of mind?

[lee058]

Good morning everybody. Hope you are all well and SAFE!

Re today's topic: peachymom1, it sounds like you have way too much to do! My advice is to take some time (you can do it) to do something nice for yourself.

Have a peaceful day, Lee

[louise]

You don't sound at all like you're giving up. You sound like you are dealing with things very well. Sometimes when you're so up close to it, it looks like you're not getting it done, but you are. I'm saying this as much to and for myself. It's good that the ritual person read the cantor the riot act. I remember once a long time ago a volunteer coordinator saying to me something like not making my lack of planning her crisis - I don't remember exactly and she and I did go on to become good friends, but there was that tough moment and that's where your cantor is deservedly standing now. You, on the other hand, have been golden and have been coming through for them. Like you said, there is still time to order that cake and invite those folks over.

You're doing it! You are right on the money (even though others may not be).

A funny thing about point of view.
I took a piece of artwork from my mom's that shows Chagall's 12 tribes stained glass windows. It is a nicely matted piece with each window displayed in an arched cutout in the mat. My brother and SIL just gave me an early birthday present - a book they bought for me when they were in Europe of Chagall's stained glass. I was comparing the 12 tribes and can see that in the piece I have hanging a number of the pictures are "flopped" (backwards). Now that I look up close I can see the Hebrew lettering is backwards. I laughed and thought maybe they shot the windows from the other side. No, that's not what I think happened. I'm admittedly free associating but surely there is some connection....

[hollygail]

I love today's topic(s)!

I am about to email my friend John, my buddy, my partner in giving out High Holy Days honors of various kinds. We will meet (over Zoom) to decide which readings for erev RH and the first day of RH. I have to check to see where I filed the YK readings and the YK outlines. I'm sure I filed them, but finding where may be a little disconcerting. I always prefer to start with the afternoon of Yom Kippur for the simple reason that fewer people come for that than for any of the other services. So whoever registers that that one gets first crack at its readings. John has never once said anything like, no, Holly, let's do it in the same sequence as the calendar. We've probably been doing this task together (either just the two of us or, in the old days, a third person frequently helped; she left the congregation more years ago than I remember to be with her daughter and grandchildren; can't blame her for that).

As for words of wisdom: Listen to you own intelligence. You know what you can do and how much of it you can do. I agree with Louise that it looks like you have figured out already that you do have the ability to do all of the things you enumerated.

Me? I'm reading 6 verses next week and started studying yesterday. I can almost read the first verse from STaM (the version that resembles what the Torah scroll looks like). It's a little tricky in that (1) it's kinda long, (2) it has three zakeif katon phrases in it, two of which are back-to-back, and (3) one three-syllable word with kadmah v'azlah (more than three notes; 8 to be precise, 2 of them on the second syllable and the remaining 5 on the third syllable). Just a little tricky... Each of the remaining verses is shorter than the first verse, so here's hoping I can master all 6 before in the next 8 days... I have no more chanting commitments until after Simchat Torah. [Whew!]

[peachymom1]

Thank you all for listening. I did order the cake for DH, I did text that mom about RH dinner, and I have been diligently practicing my Torah readings. My eating...well, tomorrow is my WI and the start of a new week, so I plan to get up and go to the gym, and get a fresh start on my eating. This is the only body I'm going to get - I need to treat it with more respect!

[gazelle18]

Good for you, Peachy!