Hatam Soferet

culture review

2011-06-24T23:29:40Z

Forgot to post about seeing The Bright Stream (Ratmansky) a couple of weeks ago. I thought it was delightful. Perhaps a little too much of the tired "ho ho! fat ladies are amusingly ill-co-ordinated! and when people try to cross gender lines, hilarity ensues!" kind of humour, but on the whole, quite lovely, artistically, musically, and technically. With bonus man en pointe and arabesque en bicyclette, which were fun to see - and no-one gets away with cheating on their wives or dumping their fiancees, of which I approve.

This week I saw Kudelka's Cinderella; it's American Ballet Theater, but this one was a lot more Theater than Ballet, and not especially good theatre at that - the jokes aren't funny and go on too long, and the whole thing feels a bit cluttered and ragged. I suppose you could say that's a subtle meta-comment on Cinderella, who is supposed to be ragged; but one expects, for example, a pas de quatre to be a *little* more co-ordinated than it in fact was. Also, putting men into dark suits and then having them dance on a black stage isn't good planning; they look like a lot of bobby-about shirtfronts in some kind of strange puppet play. Another example of *planning: ur doin it wrong* is having a whacking great circle painted on the stage and then doing a whole lot of circle dances that are embarrassingly non-circular. Just looks messy. Still, yummy costumes, and some cute ideas, plus a decent quantity of women with agency (I notice these things).

I rather enjoy the way it works high up at the top of the Met building - you buy a $20 seat, and then when the lights go (this being the Met, successively up and) down,* everyone in the $20 seats sneaks over into the empty $30 seats. With one's opera glasses (birthday-present binoculars from a long time ago), one manages rather well.

* i.e. they raise the chandeliers, and the house lights go down.

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phew, it's cooled down

2011-06-02T15:32:16Z

Best breakfast in the world ever: rice krispies with chocolate cake crumbs scraped out of the tin (waste not, want not) and raspberries and tea. Cool scented breeze from the park, tweety birds, puppy curled at feet, etc.

Raspberries from the late-night fruit stand near Lincoln Center, purchased after seeing Giselle yesterday. Manhattan life does have its good sides, and being able to buy cheap, delicious summer fruit in the middle of the night after going to the ballet and before an easy subway ride home is definitely one of them.

I find ballet (and gymnastics, and one or two similar things) awfully compelling - something about having tremendous control over your body such that you can do beautiful things and make it look easy. I can do that a bit with calligraphy, but that's scarcely a whole-body enterprise. It's also just nice watching people who are really good at what they do; Xiomara Reyes wasn't, I think, the best Giselle ever (but terribly impressive nonetheless, obviously), and Angel Corella was rather splendid.

Also yesterday, the groundsmen were in, so the gates to the flowerbeds and lawns were unlocked (they keep them locked away behind iron fences lest anybody do something as inconsiderate as, you know, lie on the grass, or sit under the trees). So I went in and dead-headed the roses and pulled some of the bindweed off the honeysuckle (discovered a patch of mint in the process).

Living half in the fantasy world wherein I have a garden, I let the dog off the lead while I was pottering about; she sprawled in the sunshine and rolled happily in my weed pile. I was very proud of her: when she wanted to have a poo, she went out and did it on the path where it's easy to pick up, instead of doing it on the grass. And then she came back to the weed pile like a good dog.

Now she's curled up on the towel I carelessly dropped on the floor, I'm about to work on a ketubah (up to my ears in ketubot this season, thankfully), and all is well.

(Edited to add: later, she took her chewy into her crate, and dropped off to sleep whilst chewing it, so when I look into the crate I see one flippy-flappy ear flopped over a chewed chewy, and a curled-up sleeping dog. It's impossible to get any work done around here, I tell you.)

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Dog Torah

2011-02-07T02:55:07Z

In honour of its being Adar, I give you Dog Torah.

I have a puppy.

Parts of her are tan-coloured like parchment, and parts of her are black and shiny like Torah ink.

She likes to squirm around on the couch.

I am a sofer stam.

Now read on...

( Pictures... )

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culture, etc

2011-01-20T17:11:28Z

Went to see La Traviata last night. Marina Poplavskaya as Violetta was glorious, my goodness. Listening to her was just delightful. (I think I also heard her in Don Carlo, but I don't remember noticing then the things I noticed this time.)

The production was one of those Minimalist Contemporary affairs driven by the idea that sets and props get in the way of the audience understanding the characters. To that end, the chorus, men and women alike, was presented as a slavering mass of men in dark suits, highlighting Violetta as The Woman, which was rather effective.

Sometimes contemporary settings of things don't quite work - I recall a Modern Richard III at Oxford - because the story's mechanics just don't translate across time. This one worked exceptionally well, I suppose because the story is basically structured around the idea that Women Who Have Extra-Marital Sex Are Morally Turpitudinous and that one, sadly, translates into the present day rather easily. (Even the tuberculosis thing translates; Poplavskaya's Violetta seemed to have pain mostly in her stomach (?) so I chose to read it as terminal stomach cancer in someone who doesn't believe in hospitals, and that made it all quite believable.)

Anyway, it was really super, although it left me feeling oddly hollow inside. Not in a bad way, just in a sort of empty way.

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on mashed potatoes

2010-08-10T02:05:10Z

Gabriel: what about [mashed potatoes] on SHABBES? is it דש?
me: no, it's מש

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overheard in beit midrash

2010-07-06T18:47:12Z

Israeli to Angli: What's 'mosaic'?
Angli to Israeli: It's when you have lots of little pieces of tile, glued together to make a design
Israeli: *looks VERY CONFUSED*
Second Israeli, learning same material: No, it means Moses wrote it.

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RIETS is not JTS

2010-06-09T01:21:15Z

"I work at YU," says the young lady at kiddush.

"Oh," says Sofer Boyfriend. "I'm in smicha there" (this was a while ago).

"I just started at YU," says the young lady. "Which part of it are you at?"

"RIETS," says Sofer Boyfriend. "The rabbinical school."

"The Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary?" says she. "That's not part of YU. That's an affiliate of YU. It's not YU proper."

"Well, okay, technically," says Sofer Boyfriend. "But when people say they're doing smicha at YU, they mean they're at RIETS."

"But it's not part of YU. It's an affiliate. The Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary is the same thing as the Jewish Theological Seminary - right?"

"No it isn't."

"Yes it is."

"No! The Jewish Theological Seminary is not part of YU at all!"

"That's right! It's an affiliate!"

At which point Sofer Boyfriend bangs head against wall repeatedly, or some such.

If only I could say something apt and witty about such associations. I'll leave that to you. Have at it in the comments :)

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Look Around You

2010-06-01T04:11:46Z

I am entirely, utterly, staying-up-past-bedtime captivated by Look Around You, a cross between the Schools Television of my youth and 1066 And All That.

They're all on YouTube. Oh, am I happy.

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theorising ahead of one's data

2010-05-14T04:00:25Z

Are there wolves in New York? we wondered.

Wikipedia says there have been sightings of wolves in the "outskirts of large cities in Minnesota, Montana and Wisconsin."

No data given for New York.

In my opinion, this lack of data proves that there are MORE wolves in NYC than in Minnesota etc. There, there were reported sightings, so the wolves left some people alive. Here, in NYC, there are no reported sightings, so it must be that all the people got eaten by the wolves.

It is, therefore, reasonable to conclude more numerous, or at any rate more thorough, wolves in the New York City area than in, for example, Wisconsin.

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A short defence of religion

2009-12-06T00:52:33Z

Here's an old question: How can you be religious when there is zero evidence to support the idea of Gods and no reason to think such a thing exists? Is it not foolish to act so illogically?

And here's one perspective.

I live with depression. Depression is very clever at erasing evidence. You can list all sorts of reasons for being glad and enjoying life, and depression can knock down every last one of them. When depression is masking your brain, it truly seems as though there is no reason at all to keep going.

But you keep going nonetheless, because you have some hazy idea that there's something beyond what the evidence suggests. Some days faith in that idea is the only thing that keeps you from giving up and swigging lethal quantities of codeine and whisky.

Most people around one agree that giving up is a bad idea. They encourage you to keep it up with the blind faith, against all perceptible evidence and rational analysis. Thus, apparently, sometimes blind faith, against the evidence and contrary to logic, is not wholly a bad thing.

I live much of my life on the basis that there is a state of being better than the one I presently perceive, even though the depression in my brain makes me unable to reason out how this could be. Even though all the available evidence suggests that such a belief is entirely unfounded, I choose to believe it, and no-one would say me nay.

As a religious person, I also live much of my life on the basis that there is a state of being beyond my present perception, even though reason and observation cannot support it.

Just as sometimes the depression lifts and life can be enjoyed, sometimes life's perspective widens and transcendence can be experienced. Both of these add value to my life.

The frames of mind which lead to each are precisely similar. One does not require any more suspension of disbelief than the other. It is not about living one's life entirely by rational scientific principles and then having a whole different set of rules for religion that require reason to be abandoned; from this perspective, it is simply about how much one concedes may be beyond the evidence. If it is not unreasonable to live with irrational faith concerning the one, it does not seem unreasonable to live with irrational faith concerning the other.

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