Hatam Soferet

Waan sniffed the water in the pond.

"Okay," you could see her thinking, "this is water. Not good to stand on."

She walked around the edge a bit and sniffed the lilypads. She's never seen lilypads before, little NYC dog that she is.

"Hmm," she was saying. "These look a good deal more substantial. Let's give them a go."

I contemplated saying "No!" but reasoned: if I stop her now, she'll only try it some time when I'm not there. The pond is deepish and weedy; better she should learn this lesson while I'm here to lifesave if necessary. Also, it's going to be funny.

So she put a tentative paw onto the lilypad, and followed it up with another paw and her weight behind it...

...and took a header into the pond, splosh.

And swam across the pond and heaved herself out indignant and dripping, and raced around the place drying off while I sat and giggled incoherently.

She's not shown any interest in the lilypads since. Instead, she's been flirting with the fountain and chasing frogs, when she can find them. Frogs are even better than tennis balls; they throw themselves!

Well, I've been in England for a while; Torah is extremely portable, so it's jolly easy to pack up a supply of parchment and a change of clothes and have a Working Holiday.

This means I write my Torah quota each day, and then instead of spending evenings and weekends in New York's social delights, I spend them with my family. Oldest Niece has just got a bunch of GCSEs...I remember when she was learning to count, cor gosh. Youngest Sister has bought a house. Parental Unit has a most fruitful garden. And so on. Bits of my family are so cute you can't quite believe they're true, it's like they're something off the TV. Mind you I suppose my life looks like that too, slightly unreal in a New Yorky sort of way.

'Cept I spent the last week or so mostly in Cambridge (Cambs, not MA) with lovely friends. Lovely friends have lovely friends, also, so that was jolly jolly nice.

Round here at this time of year one goes blackberry-picking. Done that twice now - once along Southampton Water, and once in some fields outside Cambridge - and have eaten MUCH blackberry-and-apple crumble (4 parts flour to 3 sugar and 2 hard fat, bake over fruit at 180C for about half an hour), sometimes with custard.

a) I love charity shops; loads of lovely practically-new clothes for peanuts, and the peanuts go straight to charity.

b) John Wyndham's books have been reprinted! They were issued in 1960 and 1963, and again this year. After 35 years! I love John Wyndham.

c) I had neonchameleon to myself for a whole afternoon :) Amongst his other sterling qualities, neonchameleon is one of the few people who can and does lift me two feet off the ground in a hug.

d) Starbucks in Oxford serves tea in lovely chunky mugs, if you're going to stay and drink it there obviously. That's very nice indeed. But on the other hand they close at 6.30, which is a bit of a culture shock when you're used to the Manhattan ones which are still open at bedtime. On the other hand here you can decamp to a pub and have another cup of tea there, and they're all non-smoking these days, so it's just as good really.

e) On a packed train, I claimed the seat I'd booked. This amounts to a social whoopsie on a grand scale, but I was buggered if I was going to stand all the way to Southampton on this ankle. I've never done that before, would you believe, but aside from a few dirty looks from other people it was no problem, and it was jolly nice to have a seat.

My Shabbat had a lot of this sort of thing:



because there is a lovely trinkling stream about three minutes down the road from here, with pretty woodsy banks, and trees, and ducks, and beautiful sunshine and cool breezes, and lovely oak trees in abundance, and weeping willows and ducks and green grass, which is a nice place to be on a Shabbat afternoon.

( picspam - yumminess )

( Bonus ducks )

N.B. No I do not take photographs on Shabbat. Work it out for yourselves.

Talking to the Meorot Fellows the other week about why I work as a Torah scribe given that it challenges gender roles, one of them asked me whether I thought everyone should be egalitarian, and what my vision was for Jews, and people in general.

So I said, as I generally do, that egal works for some people and not others, as is true of most lifestyle choices, and my vision generally is for people to live happy lives in well-functioning, sustainable communities. Ones where the formal structure contributes to people according each other and their surroundings the kind of treatment which contributes to their lives and environment being more or less comfortable and contented. (The point there was that in communities where imposing an egal structure would make people very uncomfortable, I wouldn't say being egal was necessarily the best thing. We're not talking about that now.)

I see the Judaism I choose to live as helping me live towards that vision. Judaism is one of my formal structures, and it prompts me - or forces me, if I'm feeling lazy - to have a sense of respect for the world I live in. To care about the members of my community. To value other human beings. Not to live selfishly. To be a basically decent person living in a basically decent community.

A couple of weeks previously, I had to change health insurance plans. As a Torah scribe, I'm self-employed, and accordingly I'm extremely lucky that I'm able to get health insurance at all. I get it through the Freelancers Union, whom I cannot praise highly enough. I have insurance; I'm one of the lucky ones, but still, I have medication that I have to take, and on my new plan, my medication costs quite a lot more. Adjusting my budget to encompass that wasn't fun, but it's not like I have a choice right now.

Also in conversation of late, I've noticed US Americans being awfully surprised that the US is not in fact the world leader in caring for the environment. Being surprised that the US lags an awful long way behind Canada and Europe in this.

And the combination of these three has made me realise this: Respect for human life and its surroundings are at the core of who I am, who I want to be, who I want my fellows to be. My day-to-day existence is structured around the Jewish customs which are the outcroppings of these principles, which lie deep and under it all. This is who I am. This is who I want to be. But I am choosing to live in a country which doesn't value human life and doesn't value its surroundings. Which doesn't have free universal healthcare and doesn't care about the environment when so doing entails any inconvenience. Whose primary formal structure has a fundamental and systemic lack of respect for human life and the world it lives in.

This is a problem.

It's mitigated by my knowing a great many extremely fine people who are very much not like this; who would rather the US worked differently, and who do in fact value both human life and the environment. On the whole, the specific community I spend my time with appears to have pretty similar values to my own, to the extent that most of the time I am able to avoid confronting this problem. I appreciate you, I really do. But unlike most of you, I have a choice: I can live elsewhere. I can leave the US and live in Britain, whose approach to human life and the environment seems more compatible with who I want to be as a Jew and who I want to be as a human.

I'm left wondering whether I should exercise that choice.

Six years ago at Limmud I took an introduction to Torah reading - seventy minutes every day for four days, how to leyn Torah. I took home the introduction and the skills and practised, and now I'm a pretty decent leyner and those skills I got at Limmud are part of how I earn a living. Two years ago I taught an introduction to calligraphy, seventy minutes a day for three days, and yesterday someone took the time to share with me how she took home the introduction and the skills and practised, and was able to incorporate Hebrew lettering into the glassworking she does by profession, so now the skills she got at Limmud are part of how she earns a living. So it goes on, along and round and up, from hand to hand, Jew to Jew, Limmud to Limmud. I think that's beautiful.

I'm taking a Retreat in the UK. That means doing Lots Of Torah Writing and not a great deal else.

It's very, very nice here. It is lushly green and smells woodsy. There are daffodils (there are daffodils in NYC also, but they are in buckets outside the grocery; here they are growing in the ground) and buttercups. And all manner of little familiar cultural things you don't notice until you don't have them. Ordering tea and not having to specify "with milk," for instance.

Journey safe and mercifully uneventful. Basically slept all the way; doesn't get much better than that!

In a post which has nothing whatsoever to do with Torah: my brother had another baby! Laura Grace. Isn't that a pretty name? Now they have Hannah Brigid and Laura Grace. I'm looking forward to getting to go home and see them.

But on the subject of family relations, we had a pleasant shabbat at Shaarei K'shishim, our assisted-living-facility-congregation in Flushing, Queens. W did a splendid job with the five columns of Torah reading, considering he'd only really started learning it Friday. Which is to say, he winged it, but with flair :)

He is awfully good with them. They absolutely adore him, which is terribly sweet. It's rather fun sitting in the corner watching your husband being all smart and besuited leading services and knowing that basically everyone in the room thinks he's super.

Haha! The Tate Modern is a modern art gallery in London, housed in an abandoned power station. As such, it has a most enormous cavern in the middle, where there used to be turbines.

So some enterprising artist has filled it with giant slides. Move over Damian Hirst, doing all those silly things like filling rooms with balloons or chairs - this is a blatant excuse to have a lot of fun, disguised as art!* Hurrah! Now I just wish I was at home so I could go play.


* like Tefillin Barbie only the other way round :)

I thought that bringing my Torah to the UK would be a really smart move, because I'd be able to work on it in a cool temperate clime with balmy breezes drifting about me. But no - now it's boiling hot here as well, and Brits don't do air-conditioning. Boiling hot, as I've said before, is bad sofrut weather, because your hands are a) warm and b) damp, and putting them anywhere near parchment in that state is a Bad Move.

So I'm doing some translating instead - more Lishkat ha-Sofer - and I'll do some writing when the sun goes down.