Notes from the start of 5766

[magid]

• Pound Hall is not a lovely space. But having davened there for so many high holidays gives it some feeling of being the right place.
  
• The drapes at the front of the women's section were three-quarters closed the whole time. No battles about reflections, at least the first night (I was too exhausted to make it to mincha-maariv after the first night. I feel old.).
  
• Though I thought with a midweek chag it would be fairly full, it wasn't, by a long shot. Better for me, though. I even found a bit of my missing kavanah. I hope it's not just visiting...
  
• I kept thinking about Elka: singing the special high holiday tune for Yigdal that we both love(d? (grammar can hurt after all); hearing her husband saying kaddish; seeing her daughter with Elka's hair, and hairstyle, and eyes, and skin tone (she's just 5, gosh darn it).
  
• For some reason, the first morning the people leading had problems. Both the shacharit and musaf baalei tefilah had hoarseness and voice challenges (both are talented people who've lead these services for years; ability is not in question), and the baal tokeah didn't pace himself as well as he might. No one thing was surprising, but as a whole, it was unusual.
  
• There was an orange and black butterfly that went by the window both mornings. This pleased me.
  
• I am a lucky person, to have had three invitations out. Each was so wholly different from the next, too. Plus I was asked to make kiddush the first night and lead bentching the first day (both honors surprised me).
  
• I attempted my first noodle kugel in a long time. Not bad, but it definitely needs work: the fruit wasn't noticeable at all, and I didn't use enough pepper for the flavor to come through, either.
  
• The first day laining includes Hagar and her son being thrown out of Avraham's house. It took me years to realize that the "na'ar" (boy, young man, not-yet-adult-in-some-way) has to be at least in his teens, given that they were thrown out for his teasing of his new half-brother, who came along 10 years after his birth. But the text has his mother putting him under a bush so as to not see him die of thirst, which always made me think of a much younger person. Yitzchak is also described as a "na'ar" in the Akedah. Oh, and this year there seemed to be a lot more parallels between the two incidents than I'd noticed before.
  
• There's a new ortho minyan rabbi at Harvard, and from what I saw over yom tov, he's not quite my style (though I suspect he's really good for the undergrads).
  
• I don't like that the mi-sheberach for cholim has changed from a list of actual people to everyone standing and saying names to themselves. Yeah, it's quicker, but feels less communal.
  
• The tunes really make it work, every year. Some piyyutim leave me cold, especially the ones with inscrutable vocabulary (more a Y"K issue, actually), but hearing the special tune for kaddish, or Aveinu Malkenu, or Yigdal (etc.), that's important. New tunes are nice, but don't evoke in the same ways, even if it's a familiar tune from other davening.
  
• There are lots of different round challah shapes.
  
• The amount of mayhem made by small children is an exponential relationship to the number of children.

Comments

[fairdice.livejournal.com]

I've never been able to reconcile the "under a bush" think with Ishmael's age when Hagar is cast out. He's reported as being 13 when he's circumcised, which is a year before Yitzchak is born (right? --is that 10 of yours a typo, or am I misremembering something?). The expulsion is one verse after Yitzchak is weaned. So Ishmael must be 14 or 15.

Though it all fits in well with the whole "years were shorter back then" theory that explains Avraham living to 175.

Shanah tovah.

[magid.livejournal.com]

A typo, a thinko, or a minimum bound: your choice.

If people are living to mid- to late-100s, then it makes sense that someone 14 or 15 is still a na'ar, but when I was young I just assumed that Hagar was carrying a small kid; no one carries teenagers around. It just doesn't make sense to me either way with the text. I want some third reading that will make it more logical.

Side thought: obviously, Hagar is a caring parent, and one who continues to care (she finds him an Egyptian wife later on). I wonder why she let him get away with teasing Yitzchak so much, knowing that the power dynamics wouldn't go in her favor. If she hadn't let him do that, would he have been raised in the household, or would there have been some other reason found to expel him?

[fairdice.livejournal.com]

I, along with probably all other parents in the world, have to point out that in any strife-inducing interaction between two kids, their respective mothers are likely to have differing interpretations of who's at fault. The accusation came from Sarah, who prevailed, and while Avraham was persuaded to turn Hagar out, it's never clear than he is convinced it is justified -- only mollified by the promise that all will turn out well for her anyway.

[magid.livejournal.com]

True enough. Though the kids are such different ages that I'd assume it's easier to find them different things to do/places to be/etc than if they were closer in age.

And yeah, with Sarah against them, this is how it would turn out. I wonder what inheritance rules were back then, what kind of status kids of non-wives had. Or perhaps it was all the father's choice.

(Shanah tovah to you :-)