2007

That’s short for “The Eternal has given, the Eternal has taken away.” From the book of Job, originally, now recited before Jewish funerals. It concludes with an affirmation that the Eternal is still the Source of Blessing: Y’hi shem Adonai m’vorach.

The children have arrived and we’ve gotten through the first (partial) day. It went well. It’ll be rocky and scary at times, I know, but I’m really proud to be becoming the mother of four. More on that another time.

And Alexis cat has died. Less than 3 days after we knew something was wrong. We’ll bury her on the farm, with appropriate words. The children will be there, I hope. In the meantime her body is in the barn, kept watch over (metaphorically speaking, since she’s in the grain room) by the goats.

So the count is as follows:

• 1 cat
• 2 dogs
• 3 parrots
• 4 children
• 6 goats
• about 50 chickens
• and the murmuring of innumerable bees

The irony is that tonight while I was milking I was rehearsing those numbers in my head, thinking about blogging, and I thought, “Well, at some point it’ll be one cat again, but for now it’s 2 cats, 2 dogs…” But she’d already died, and we didn’t know it yet.

When I was a kid, my parents always took us out to look at the lights on Christmas Eve. I don’t actually remember envying Christmas, but according to at least one of my parents I did express a wish to celebrate it when I was five or so. They explained that while it was not our holiday, we could enjoy some parts of it; and that was always our rationale for going out and looking at the lights. I want to pass that on to my kids: Being Jewish and in the minority doesn’t mean having to be defensive.

I remember going to Maple Bluff, outside Madison, because they always had good light displays. That was before I turned six, and the name still means magic to me. Later I remember hot chocolate, and sometimes being bored (as a teen — what do you expect?) but I also remember thinking that I could string lights more elegantly than many people; I had definite ideas about what I liked and didn’t like and wondered if I could get people to pay me for designing their Christmas lights.

This year my two sons, ages 5 and almost 7, are finally old enough to really participate. “Look at those lights!” “Ooh, blue.” “See that Santa over there?” “Those pretend candles in the windows are really pretty.” We showed each other the lights, and I remembered how my sisters and I would call “doorbell!” when we saw a house otherwise not lit up but with a lit doorbell. It won’t be long before our kids will be calling “Look at those red and green and yellow lights!” for stoplights and tail lights and things like that, trying to fool us.

There’s an amazing trio of houses all lit up and decorated where Route 66 leaves Route 2, which we slowed down to really appreciate. I think they outdo themselves each year. But the first and last lights we see on this journey are on the tall pine tree at the farm across the road. It was very sweet. I hope it will really become a family tradition.

It looks like an old farmhouse table, even though it was bought new yesterday. Our house was first built more than 200 years ago; perhaps a table like this has been in the kitchen before. We can actually fit 3 kids on each side of this table, and that’s without putting in either of the leaves — so we will all fit, and still have some room for company! And it weighs about 200 pounds, so a small kid pushing themselves away from the table — or the dog finding her place under it — doesn’t move the table.  Any more!

It’s the first anniversary of Eldest Son’s adoption — and his last Shabbat as eldest. On the day after Christmas, Younger Son’s siblings will move to our house. So Eldest Son will become Middle Son, and Younger son will become Youngest Son, and Little Sister will be the smallest. But Eldest Son will always be our First Child, and tonight we celebrate.

Wish us luck. Four children. God bless them every one.

I was just having a long-distance conversation with someone I’m studying with and she commented that women are forbidden from wearing tefillin. So naturally I sent her the picture of Rosie the Riveter wearing tefillin (and since she’s wearing them on her right arm, Rosie must be a lefty!)

I’d posted that picture about a year ago, in my post about my dilemma about laying tefillin. But this time I seem to have found the woman who created the picture! See it on her blog here. She also has a link to wikipedia’s discussion about women and tefillin.

And while you’re at it you have to see the Barbie pictures too…

I’m sure there’s something in Leviticus about spilling goat’s blood. Or maybe in Numbers? If I were A. J. Jacobs (The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible), I’d be able to cross another commandment off my list. Perhaps. I don’t think it’s supposed to be accidental spillage.

I was trimming hooves after milking and cut too deeply into one of Sandy’s. Not just a little welling up, which I’ve had before, but a veritable river of bright red blood dripping onto the white-painted milking stand. Oops, in a big way.

Not having styptic powder on hand (or if we did, it was in quantities sufficient only for parrot toenails), I ran to the kitchen — ok, took great strides carefully over the still-icy-from-yesterday-ground — found the corn starch, made my way back to the barn and globbed handfuls of it on her toe. For about 10 minutes. Though it felt like half an hour. Finally I could see that the flow of blood was slowing down, though it never did stop. Bright green vet wrap held some of the globby stuff against the cut, and last I saw she was up and eating hay, after wrinkling her nose at molasses water (but taking three drinks of it. I have a lot of confidence in her choosing what she needs, if it’s offered).

I’ve been reading Jacobs’s book and it reminded me that our Jewish ancestors were probably quite familiar with goat’s blood. If he writes about it, though, I haven’t gotten there yet. More about the book on my new page, “What the Rabbi is Reading.”

I’m tickled to have had this previous blog entry, “Snow Geese,” featured last week on the front page of the Capitol Region section of the TU. I think — I hope — it’s a sweet little piece of writing. But what’s really interesting to me is the conversation that barry and I got into in the comments. (I know Barry — or barry, his written persona — from the synagogue, but it seems we communicate most often through the electronic world.)

If you like, you can traipse through barry’s very long post, “eve and the two world trees”, which he mentions at the end of comment #4. I originally wrote most of what’s below as a comment to his post. But you can also just click the “More” button and read on…

We are creators and inventors, we humans, and as such we have the capacity to surprise God. That’s part of what being created b’tselem Elohim, in God’s image, means. Genesis, especially the first half, is not just the story of humanity’s growing up; it’s the story of God’s growing up, of God’s having to constantly re-evaluate the relationship between divine and human, and to update God’s expectations of the human being!

I’d written (in a comment to my “Snow Geese” post) something about nature basically being in balance, but barry reminded me (in his comment #4):

also, don’t write off the rest of nature as being all in balance. it’s worth keeping an eye on. it’s come up with big surprises before too! like cyanobacteria inventing photosynthesis and filling the atmosphere with oxygen and burning off the rest of the critters. or algae and watermolds inventing rainforests 400million years ago. or even recently, grasses inventing a way to keep their buds underground and burning off all the other plants out west and inventing prairies. our ability to surprise has its roots.

of course we are VERY quick at what we do. that’s why we are so confused! becomeing human was SO fast. our heads are still spinning!

This is what I wrote in answer, posted on his blog:

We invent and blue-green algae invent too. Creativity seems to be part of the reason (or essence, or whatever word you want to use) for/of the universe. But algae and even chimpanzees create slowly, evolve in limited steps.

In creating us, on the other hand, in creating us with self-awareness, the universe/the divine created a creator that could go off in myriad and unpredictable directions, rapidly, simultaneously. Seen that way, we’re part of the universe’s push toward creativity and inventiveness, toward playing out combinations and permutations.

But perhaps there’s more to us as creators and inventors than just abundent variety. I’m thinking of a concept I read of a decade or more ago, in a science fiction novel by writer Shari Tepper. I don’t remember the name of the book, though I’ll Google her to look it up. (Ah, there is is: Grass.)

The idea: That God created the larger, clunkier aspects of the universe — gravity, time, the strong and the weak nuclear forces, electricity and magnetism, cause and effect and so forth — and left the details for us to work out: truth, justice, compassion, peace. (The “small things”… !)

I think Tepper has her protagonist introduce the idea that we are like God’s viruses: We are small workers, tiny enough to do the jobs that require manipulation too small and delicate and precise to be done by hands.

So I’m thinking: Given what we know today, perhaps we are not just God’s viruses … but God’s genetically-engineered viruses.

Viruses run around the universe doing their thing, which primarily seems to be replicating. In the course of this, they have effects, often unpleasant, upon their hosts. But the purpose of a virus seems basically to be — being a virus. Living as a virus and making more viruses.

We now know how to genetically engineer viruses so that while they’re running around doing their thing, they’re also automatically doing some tiny jobs that change their world for the better in specific, planned, micro-ways. We can set viruses up to do their own little version of tikkun olam, world-repair; we can give them a purpose (from our point of view, that is) and they will carry it out, all unknowing that they were programmed to do this job.

I don’t mean this to “prove anything”; it’s just an idea, a little midrash. If we’re God’s genetically engineered viruses, then as we run around the universe doing our human creative thing, we are carrying out a purpose for which we were designed. Perhaps our amazing b’tselem Elohim capacity to create and invent — even to re-invent ourselves — allows us to reach into the metaphorical “spaces” that God’s “fingers” are too small to reach, in order to manipulate the delicate pieces that create compassion, peace, justice and truth.

I saw the comet tonight! Nice way to celebrate the second night of Chanukah!

You can see it in constellation Perseus with bare eyes, but it’s even clearer with a simple pair of binoculars. It’s beautiful.

But wait! you say. Don’t you need to see two celestial objects for the second night of Chanukah?

Well, as recently as 1500 years ago — no. Talmud says that the mitzvah of Chanukah is to light one candle for the whole household. People who want to do the mitzvah beautifully (ha-m’hadrin) light one candle for each member of the household. Only those who wanted to celebrate Chanukah super-beautifully (ha-m’hadrin min ha-m’hadrin) began with one candle and added one per night (the opinion of the School of Hillel) — or, possibly, began with 8 and subtracted one each night (the School of Shammai). Who knew? So apparently somewhere along the way it became the custom for everyone to celebrate “super-beautifully” according, of course, to the opinion of the school of Hillel.

So the one beautiful light in the sky can be, symbolically, a Chanukah light, according to the simplest and oldest way of celebrating Chanukah.

Oh and by the way, as long as I was out there I turned my binoculars on Orion’s sword, and lo and behold, I think I saw the Orion nebula (M42) in all its fuzzy glory. So there’s two.

Today there’s someone praying the afternoon or evening prayer (I think it’s after sunset now) in the Chapel. So even though the lights are brighter than when I was here last week, I won’t take a picture to show you what the “Jewish” mural looks like.

It was about 3 hours waiting during surgery. Which went well. I got to hear a lot of wonderful family stories. But there’s a lot of energy racing about inside of me, and I don’t want to drive home just yet. I need to empty it. It doesn’t feel today so much like “grounding” energy as it is shooting rays of light from my upturned palms toward the heavens. That’s the metaphor that works right now. I can feel the energy dissipating, slowly. (Or rather, I felt that, and I’m writing about it just after. But these are the words I was thinking, when I was thinking at all, with the energy radiating out from my palms.)

There is a soft triangular knitted shawl lying near the waterfall today. Someone has written the following and carefully stitched it onto the shawl:

Dear Lord, give this shawl the ability to bring comfort to the person wearing it. May they know that you are with them, that they are not alone and that your loving arms are around them. Amen.

Please leave shawl in Chapel

I put it on. It is a comfort. Perhaps because as a Jew I am accustomed to being wrapped in a tallit. Perhaps for some other reason. This is the kind of thing that I often don’t try, but I wanted to try it. It struck me as a lovely thing, that someone made this and left it here for others. It seems gentle and generous. And anonymous and private, in a way that the ledger book for writing prayers in doesn’t seem to me.

For whatever reason, this strikes me as a ritual that is good and lovely — and it works for me.