For the various people who were asking about my challah recipe, the following makes 1 loaf; I'd allow 1 loaf for 4-6 people at a Shabbes table, and multiply up as necessary.

Per loaf:
1/2 tsp yeast (start in warm water)
1 egg, 1/4 cup sugar, 1/4 cup oil (beat up)
2 cups bread flour
1/2 tsp salt

I drop it all in the food mixer and add enough water that a soft, quite sticky dough forms. The food mixer also kneads it, which is handy, and heats it up a bit, which is also handy.

Then I let it rise in the warm for a couple hours, knock it down, shape it, let it rise another hour or so, and bake at 350-ish until loaves sound hollow when tapped underneath. I usually glaze with oil after 15 minutes in the oven; egg works too but I never remember to save some from the initial stage and hate wasting a whole extra egg.

Note - this recipe makes a delicious, soft loaf that doesn't hold a shape well - if you want to do anything more complex than a braid, you need a stiffer dough.

I've always enjoyed this sort of thing. Making miniatures, I mean, not Judaising Barbie, that's just a side-effect. These days, now I have a scanner and a super-duper colour printer, it's so easy...back in the days of dot-matrix printers, you had to find little images in magazines and flyers and so on, and there was always a certain sense of glee when you found something you could turn into a miniature. Now, I want to make a box of matzah, I can just scan a box of matzah...

I nearly ran out of the sermon screaming this week.

Our rabbi is great, and his sermons are unusual - they're actually worth listening to. He's one of the rare people I will make an effort to hear, rather than sneak out to avoid; he doesn't say obnoxious stuff or stupid stuff, and quite often he says really thoughtful, interesting, intelligent stuff. So this week, when he said something that made me go hot and cold and trembly, it was an experience out of the ordinary.

I'm going to tell you about it because it's interesting, but remember that our rabbi is the nicest, kindest, most menschlik person you could imagine, and what happened is the fault of the culture we live in, not the fault of our rabbi. Our rabbi is a simply splendid chap and you should think very highly of him, please.

The subject was the Ten Commandments, and what the mystical commentary the Zohar has to say about "Do not murder," "Do not steal," and "Do not commit adultery."

Basically the Zohar chooses to blur the moral absolutes - i.e. there are many impulses which in moderation are very good things, and in extremis are really really bad. For example: the impulse that leads to stealing isn't actually bad, because Wanting Things fuels things like art and civilisation, just when it goes bad it becomes stealing. Getting inspiration from someone else is a sort of stealing, if you look at it one way, but it's not bad stealing. There's generally moderate versions of things which are good.

When giving a sermon you're supposed to bring an example from real life so that your congregation can connect on a personal level. Our rabbi knows his homiletics, and he told a story about a friend who wanted to lose weight. The friend would be so good denying himself fat or carbs or whatever it was, and then he would crack and eat steak and ice-cream and things and Stop Dieting because he had Failed.

This was the point where I wanted to get up and leave, get out, run away. You see why I was so distressed?

What are the sins in this sermon so far?

Murder.

Theft.

Adultery.

Being fat.

THIS SERMON JUST COMPARED BEING FAT TO MURDER, THEFT AND ADULTERY.

Not on purpose, you understand. That wasn't the point of the sermon. Nonetheless, that's what just happened, and it knocked me sideways.

The rabbi is speaking in the vocabulary of our cultural narrative, and we have a very powerful cultural narrative that says eating is a morally dubious act. To diet is to be virtuous; to eat as much as you want is to be grossly inappropriate. We surround ourselves with the message that no effort is too extreme, no sacrifice too great, if thinness will result. To be thin is a constant, all-consuming goal for an enormous number of people.

The cultural narrative, in other words, does seem to put eating on a par with murder, theft, and adultery, so it should come as no surprise that our rabbi chose eating to illustrate a point about impulses which have the potential to be socially destabilising on a grand scale.

For me, this eating-message isn't compatible with the Jewish message. The eating-message says: your body is gross and you are gross for letting it be that way, and if you work very very hard, it might one day be marginally closer to acceptable than it is now. But my Jewish message says: every human being is worthwhile; the world is good; to live is to reflect the Divine glory.

So it distressed me to hear eating being semi-consciously compared to murder. Validating the idea that bodies are inherently repellent by speaking about dieting in a sermon validates the idea that you can only be happy and healthy if you are thin. It validates a corrosive, body-hating, self-hating philosophy.

The stated message of the sermon was this idea that many things are good in moderation but damaging in extremes. I'm okay with this. I accept that too much eating can be damaging. (Likewise breathing too much oxygen.) That's a perfectly reasonable message for a sermon. But it concerns me that the subtle message, the one that is heard by the brain and not by the ears, the one that lurks in the subconscious, was far more sinister.

That was what I heard from the pulpit this Shabbat, and that was why I wanted to run out screaming.

P.S. Please remember to blame the culture and not the rabbi. It's not. his. fault. Okay?

Talmud which made me chuckle:

Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi queried the verse in Proverbs, All the days of the poor are evil* - but surely they have Shabbat and festivals?
Shmuel said pessimistically, Change of diet leads to indigestion...

(Sanhedrin 101a, Proverbs 15:15)

Talmud which made me sad:

(As a small point in a long discussion about something else entirely) The world cannot exist without both males and females; happy is he whose children are male, and woe to he whose children are female.

(Sanhedrin 100b)

Ouch. Way to feel really alienated.

More Talmud which made me chuckle:

Ulla was in Babylon, and he saw dates were on sale. He exclaimed, "A tub of honey for a quarter, and yet the Babylonians don't occupy themselves with Torah study!"

During the night he suffered hideously from overeating, and he exclaimed, "A tub of knives for a quarter, and even so the Babylonians occupy themselves with Torah study!"

(Taanit 9b, and okay he said zuz and not quarter, but I translated for meaning, okay.)

Wednesday, afternoon with tangosiempre. We went down to Weston Shore for a walk along the beach.

Weston Shore was the only beach I knew for many years. It's mostly shingle and mud, with the occasional patch of sand; I used to find books like Holiday by the Sea very perplexing, when they went on about beautiful golden sands etc. You don't need a bucket and spade to build castles at Weston, you need a ruddy bulldozer.

Anyway. it's a nice place to go for a walk, when you aren't seven years old and pining for sand. And on the way there we realised that it's blackberry-picking time, yay! and I haven't picked blackberries in England for years and years cos I've been expatriated so long, so yay! but we didn't have anything to put blackberries in.

Happily for us, there was a fair bit of litter washed up on the beach (there always is, okay? This is the Solent. No-one said it was clean), and in no time we had two nice plastic containers with lids, which we pretty soon filled up with luscious blackberries. I also found sweet peas growing wild, and I picked a bunch of them because when you pick sweet peas they flower more so it isn't antisocial to pick them. Down to the shore again for a bit of string to tie the bunch together, and another plastic box, and soon enough I had a big box of shiny black blackberries and bright cerise-pink flowers. Awfully pretty.

Then we got ice-cream, because one of the peculiarities of the English is that they think a proper summer ought to involve walking along a shingle beach in a howling gale eating ice-cream, although if you are over 65 you may sit in your car while you are eating. No matter how revolting the weather, there is always an ice-cream van at windswept points on shingle beaches, manned by a hermit who will make jokes about the weather.

There'll be a Torah post eventually, honest there will. Anybody got anything they'd particularly like me to write about?

Reading the tea packet:

Even in times of crisis Twinings has never failed to serve its customers. During the Blitz sales were briefly interrupted when a bomb knocked out part of the building. However, within a few hours a table was set up in the doorway and tea sales carried on as normal...

You can dump it in its raw, natural state, on pasta.
You can put cream and water in it, and it is cream of tomato soup.
You can put just water in it, and it is regular tomato soup.
You can add mince, and it is bolognese sauce.
You can add mince and chili beans, and it is chili.
You can spread it on pita, add cheese, and grill, and it is pizza.

Then it is Saturday.

Oh, my. I bought a mini-kettle, so as to be able to boil water for tea whilst at Drisha. Hitherto I've been boiling water in the microwave; they have a hot-water machine, but it's not hot. And the microwave somehow imparts a funny tinny taste to the tea.

And the kettle? Makes tea. And the tea?

Is.

Amazing.

Courtesy of lethargic_man:



(cutting matzah. It's funny.)

Who's seen these? I met them yesterday. Sort of like a tea ball, only an awful lot less fiddly - you put some tea in it and stick it in the cup with some tea, put the lid on to keep it warm, and when it's done you take it out and park it on the lid. Isn't that an awfully good idea?