The American Clock

I saw The American Clock (Arthur Miller) at the Huntington (well, Studio 210 next door) this weekend. It's a depressing play*, being about the Depression from just before the crash in 1929 through the many desperate years until the beginning of WWII turned the economy around. I don't think I've seen that period portrayed so vividly before, showing people in New York who lost everything in the stock market and subsequent bank failure (and one who saw the warning signs and got out in time), Iowan farmers who lost their farms for pennies on the dollar, how barter became a way of life for many as money became infrequent.

I wonder whether I would have survived those times. It made me understand more my father's attitudes towards money, definitely.

The stage area was technically a thrust stage, but the audience was small enough that no one ended up in the side seats. That meant I had a good view of the CCC-style paintings along the side walls. The action happened in the thrust part of the stage; the back was filled with period-appropriate stuff (some props, some not), including costume changes for the actors who each cycled through a number of roles, which worked.

It was interesting to see the two views of what happened and how the country pulled out of it. The pragmatist, the one who saw the signs and preserved his wealth, based it all on stuff, orders that did or didn't happen, factories producing or not, and so on. Everyone else seemed to ride the wave of belief and emotion, that the stock market could go sky high without the numbers to base it on, that it would all come back 'soon', that the turnaround happened because people re-found their belief in the country. I think the pragmatist was mostly right, but emotions play a role, too.

* Not the most depressing I've seen; Horton Foote's 1918 (WWI, questions of patriotism, and an epidemic) was more of a downer, for instance.

Pasul, again

Shabbat morning I davened at Tehillah. During the second aliyah the lainer found a problem with the sefer Torah, serious enough to pasul it.

The decision: read the rest of the parasha without aliyot (and the person currently receiving an aliyah did not say the after-bracha). No maftir, and kaddish was moved after the haftarah (I think; it was definitely moved later). Regular hagbah, glilah, and returning of the sefer Torah.

This is not the first, nor the second, time an error has been found in this sefer Torah. The minyan was given the sefer Torah by Save-a-Torah, which refurbishes sifrei Torah that have survived the Holocaust but no longer have communities to use them. I talked with one of the minyan chairs during kiddush, and apparently the organization checked the whole thing before it arrived, 'by computer.' I'm not really sure what that means. Last time there was an error found, there happened to be a sofer in town who could do the fix quickly, but now there is the question of whether it's necessary to have the whole scroll checked by a human, which costs serious money, not easy for a small minyan to afford.

The minyan meets Shabbat morning only twice/solar month, so there are parshiyot that have not yet been read, and I wonder how many other issues there might be.


As always, if there are words you'd like explicated, let me know; I'm lazy enough not to bother unless someone asks.