Livre d'Or

So next/this year I'm assigned to Wimbledon, a kind of apprenticeship or internship where hopefully I will learn how to actually do the job of a rabbi as a whole, rather than individual pieces of it. They have asked me to write an article introducing myself for their magazine. And I'm really struggling to write something not boring; what I have reads like a list of the places I've lived, worked and volunteered with the Jewish community, like a very pedestrian covering letter. So, if you were a member of a synagogue and there was a new intern about to join, what would you want to know about them? I've included the (slightly redacted) draft below the cut.

( this is boring even to me and I'm the subject )

One of my next year teachers has set us for our pre-class homework over the summer "read a book". Like, literally pick up a book and read it. Presumably there's a point to this, I was planning to read some books anyway, but I assume there's more to it than just ticking the box to say, yup, I read a book. Suggestions welcome! If an eminent professor of Bible told you to read a book, what would you pick? I know the prof is an SF fan, she's trying to start a theological SF reading group.

Not quite my first full day off since March but not far off it either. I aten't dead but I have badly run out of time for keeping in touch with people. Anyway the headline is, I have sort of finished my third year of rabbinic training although like every year there's this weird limbo between the end of teaching in mid-May and the actual end of the year first week in July.

( new experiences in the past several months )

Coming up: I'm going to two conferences this month, one for the newly formed Progressive Movement (combining two previous small denominations) and one international but held in London. (I'm glad Covid levels are actually low for the first time in 5 years, but I would have attended anyway, these are going to be the best networking opportunities ever.) The usual fortnight of random extra classes after the end of the main part of term has been condensed to three days because of the conferences, bracketed by the viva talk of our sole ordinand and then her actual ordination ceremony.

Further on into the summer I'm being helpful Jewish person for a long-running Jewish-Christian forum in Germany. And starting what will be my fourth year placement at Wimbledon Reform. In contrast to the first three years when I was here, there and everywhere, most of fourth year I'm going to be attached to that one community, so it's more like I'm a kind of assistant minister and less just showing up and leading services or teaching one-off classes. I'll miss the variety but it's clearly very relevant to actually practise doing a rabbi-type job.

Do I have a life outside Rab School? Sort of, but it's mostly quite domestic, spending time with my partners when I can. I've just had a couple of days visiting my MiL and getting my first sunburn of the year walking in the Malverns. I've managed to visit angelofthenorth once, and occasionally get my act together to drink tea with hatam_soferet, but other than that totally failed to see any of my friends or even email or call them.

I want to talk about the education privilege meme that's been doing the rounds. On the one hand I love old-school memes that encourage lots of cool people on my d-roll to talk about their experiences growing up. But at the same time, I'm kind of frowning at this particular iteration.

( thinky thoughts )

Anyway, hopefully this is an adequate substitute for the meme and you don't need me to tell you in detail how absurdly precocious I was in reading and maths.

Content note: mentions antisemitic murders and police violence. I personally am completely safe, I'm only talking about dealing with news.

It's around midday Yom Kippur. I'm leading the morning service with a tiny community in the southwest corner of England. There's a slight hiatus as this congregation only have two Torah scrolls, so we have to roll through from the first reading in Exodus to the second reading in Leviticus, saving the second scroll for the afternoon reading from Deuteronomy. (In this community, like most of the Progressive world, our second reading is Leviticus 19, not the verses that are sometimes used as clobber texts to support homophobia.) While there's milling about, the volunteers running the tech for Zoom approach me at the bimah and let me know that there has been an attack in a synagogue in Manchester.

( reactions ) Also, I am deeply grateful for the kind people who checked in with me personally when they heard the news, and for all the leaders, Muslim, Christian and civic, who sent messages of support to the Jewish community and continue to be in solidarity with us.

This weekend one of my oldest friends got married, and my partners celebrated their 20^th anniversary with a Jewish blessing and wedding canopy. So I had a lovely lovely time, and also I'm very much reminded that there's a crowd of (mostly somewhat connected) people I've been friends with for most of 30 years and I should make more active effort to actually spend time with them because they are awesome.

( wedding squee )

I sort of want to see if I can make it to my brother's charity's ceilidh next week. But Friday evening events in Brighton when I have a bar mitzvah in Cambridge on Saturday are a bit unworkable. And although I enjoyed the dancing, what I want more of isn't mainly dancing, it's spending time with people. And waiting for my friends to have reunions in the form of weddings isn't very efficient! I'm amazed that there were even two weddings this year, with most of my circle being in our 40s. jack has planned a bank holiday picnic next Monday; it will be fully outdoors, which is good for infection risk but possibly bad for enduring summer weather. But if you happen to be in Cambridge you're most welcome.

It's been a full and emotional couple of months, friends. The main thing to report is that I was supposed to be in Israel as of a week ago, but Israel bombed Iran and Iran retaliated and the go/no-go date for my summer programme was right in the middle of the 11 days when Israel was in full lockdown due to lots of missile attacks, so they really had to cancel it. I have a whoooooole lot of emotions and thoughts about this, and I also have an unexpected summer month with almost no commitments.

( rab student life in interesting times )

I will fully admit that I'm glad I didn't end up getting on a flight two days later. Intellectually it goes without saying that I would far rather Israel was in fact safe enough for me to be there, and that it had been consistently obvious it would be over the past couple of months. But personally, I am absolutely delighted to be at home. And have a chance to see my family and do fun summer things like go to concerts and have picnic dates and sort out practical things that I've let slip with the intensity of everything since Mum got sick. I even managed to overlap in London with redbird and her partners this week, which was an unexpected and wonderful bonus. Among many chill, non-urgent summer plans I am hoping to be a bit more present here.

As posted under lock, my mother died on 11 March. ( the past couple of months )

My next big thing is that college are insisting we absolutely have to spend the summer in Israel. I don't want to, mainly because I don't think it's ethical, partly because I'm not convinced it's safe, and a small amount because I just don't want to be away from my people for several weeks, especially not far enough away that the only way to get home is several hours' flight. After much soul-searching I've come to the conclusion that I don't want to burn the amount of goodwill it would take to refuse to go. So I'm going to spend a few weeks studying at the pluralist yeshiva, Pardes. I think the actual studying will be great, even if I don't want to be there.

If you want to tell me I'm a horrible person for allowing myself to be pressured into going, well, you're probably right. If you want to be helpful, please recommend me good resources for working on my modern Hebrew over the next couple of months. I know about Duolingo and will probably put in a little bit of graft there, but ideally I want to listen to and read Hebrew media. At the moment I'm putting on Kan Bet (Hebrew language talk radio, I think more or less equivalent to Radio 4) in the background, and it is definitely helping with immersion, but I could do with something more interesting, basically. Indie radio or podcasts or a series or something. My language skills are at a rather awkward level; I am not a beginner and my strong classical Hebrew helps quite a lot, but I can't exactly follow spoken Hebrew at natural pace, I can sometimes get the gist depending on the topic and the accent of the speaker. So I think that means I'm at a level where I will get better with just lots of exposure, but any more structured recommendations would be welcome.

I was very interested in Jude Doyle's TERFs, Trans Mascs and Two Steve Feminism, and even more so in sbqr's thinky response.

( read the essays by the experts first, but my thoughts fwiw )

On a related note, I very much resonated with this piece by kiya: Better Days Were On Their Way, as well as the linked Grace Petrie anthem, about the specific brain damage that comes of having been in high school in the 90s I have a very different experience of gender from kiya and in a different continent at that, but I think we must be very close to the same age. So we were for the most part alone, and we knew to be afraid. I knew zero out gay people at school, and almost none in my wider circles. A couple of friends tried to come out to me and I didn't respond well because I didn't understand their necessarily coded language, so probably they thought I was basically more or less straight and cis and likely dangerous with it.

I definitely don't want to presume, but maybe this is an avenue of solidarity with trans men: a partially shared experience of being perceived as cis girls in a world where it was not only dangerous to be anything at all other than straight and binary gendered, but almost impossible to imagine anything else. Which is not at all to say that I think trans men are actually women, that would be a really offensively wrong opinion. But maybe we have in common the same danger and the same deliberately engineered ignorance affected people from lots of different genders and sexualities and backgrounds.

So my OSOs decided it was past time for me to watch Die Hard (1988). I came back from my first service leading of 2025, and headed straight to my partners' to warm up and recuperate. And we watched the film, my first time and everybody else rewatching a well-loved favourite.

There's no point writing a review of one of the most famous films of the 20^th century, but I can say that my life is improved by having seen it. I don't generally like action films, and I did definitely have nightmares about being chased through a labyrinthine building by armed pursuers, but I can also totally see why it's such a classic. I definitely appreciated the great acting by the leads and the minor characters, and the very clever scoring, and the way that all the little details were meaningful. I did not at all love the pro-gun message; it's not just a film where the entire plot is basically an extended shoot-out sequence, but specifically blazons the moral that you need a good guy with a gun to stop bad guys with guns.

I don't see how there's any debate over whether it's a Christmas movie. The only element missing is that it takes place in the HQ of a corporation in LA, and not in a small town. But apart from that it's the Christmasest movie ever to Christmas! It even includes a plot about how love is more important than career success (I liked the relationship arc, but I didn't love that rekindling love is symbolized by the protag's wife taking his name instead of using her own.) ghoti_mhic_uait argued that it could also be a Chanukah movie, on the grounds that it contains both doughnuts and a tiny band of heroes defeating a superior force in the name of freedom. I was only partially convinced, I still haven't seen anything as Chanukah suitable as Star Wars: Rogue One.

Christmas eve: spent a quiet day with jack. Started our Christmas dinner at around 3 pm, didn't actually take much over 2 hours to make the trimmings of roast dinner. These days we don't bother with substituting the roast part with anything vegetarian, we just have piles of roast potatoes and parsnips and Yorkshire puddings and cheese, some cooked and some just for eating.

Christmas day we wrapped a lot of presents and ate some leftovers for brunch, and then headed to OSOs' to join them for their Christmas dinner. ghoti_mhic_uait and her 16yo S made an amazing amazing roast for 10 people. And in between we unwrapped presents and played a bit with some of the new stuff and lit first candle for Chanukah. Which was really lovely, we told quite a few versions of the story and somehow got on to a discussion of Biblical unicorns, for which cjwatson's dad provided a relevant comic song. The older three children are old enough not to get overwhelmed by Christmas or make drama over gifts, and the 4yo is just incredibly mature and patient, so it felt a lot more like a comfortable, companionable adult Christmas than a magical but emotionally exhausting child one.

We also watched Dr Who: Joy to the World and Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance most fowl. I'm not particularly into Dr Who; I have absorbed it from general culture and having fans in the family, and catch up with the Christmas special or a random episode from time to time rather than actually following it. This episode was mawkish as Christmas specials always are, and the plot was thin, but it was really well acted, and Gatwa is the first Doctor I've seen who makes me react, I'd like to see more of this. The W&G is a creditable addition to the franchise but I didn't love it. Possibly because I'm just older and my memories of the earlier features are enhanced by nostalgia, but it felt a bit thin. Some great jokes, both puns and visuals, animation as excellent as usual, but there seemed to be more filler compared to the delightful moments.

( soooooo many presents )

Today, following our tradition for (un)boxing day, we have been playing some of the new games and generally chilling. I made French onion soup, which I love but rarely have the patience for. And tomorrow I am promised latkes and good company for my birthday.