(sparked by entries in Cthulhia's and Tigerbright's journals. recreated after an email from Idjit Boss crashed my machine (Yes, I should've saved the text before trying to open an email. Who knew she'd manage to fit a bomb into a short congratulatory note?).)
I still find not writing on shabbat is the hardest thing. It's the perfect time, with few distractions, the leisure to think about things, pay attention to details, figure out patterns, process the week, in short. And I can definitely see how things like talking to long-distance friends, or enjoying an art show, or driving to hang out with local friends, or playing games involving writing, could be in the spirit of shabbat, though outside the halachic (Jewish legal) framework.
So I think about changing what I do. And yet again I find myself up against some walls.
Some are not related to how I think I should live my life directly at all: if I change what I do, will I still be accepted in the Jewish community I'm currently in? I've changed a lot of my friend groups in the last year or 2 and am not as socially tied to the minyan, but I still want to be a part of it, even if less of my time is spent there (Why I still want to be there is another question, one I'm not sure I can answer with anything better than "because."). Unlike many of the friends I've found since then, the Jewish groups I'm in tend to be rather judgemental.
(It was such a relief finding people who weren't like that, with all the little yardsticks of "frum enough" or "not good enough," ranging from what acceptable hechsherim (kosher marks) are to whether you'll shake hands with a member of the opposite sex to whether you rip toilet paper on shabbat (yes, I'm not kidding.). Actually, somehow all the groups I know that have as part of their self-definition that the members are Jewish seem to have their yardsticks.)
So I want to be a person/run a house (kitchen) that is acceptable to the group. This includes not only the food preparation, but my sabbath observance as well.
Another piece of it is feeling like I'm changing my story. First I wanted to do this, and now, not. I seem to have inherited from my dad a rather stupid tendency to absolutely stick to choices, even if circumstances have changed, or I've changed, or whatever. I see it in him, and hate it. And yet, I seem to do it myself. So I've told myself, and others around me, that I keep shabbat. So darn it, that's what I do. And in some ways it's a lot easier to stick with the status quo: there aren't those awkward moments of someone saying "You can do THAT on shabbat?" And me answering "Well, I'm sort of re-evaluating what I do...." Which is yet again an external sort of disincentive.
If I buy into halacha, feeling that this is how I should lead my life, then I should do it properly (if I can. And I've been managing to do shabbat for years, so I don't have any really good excuses for no longer being able to.) as much as possible. Yes, there are a variety of opinions on some issues. And yes, the Jewish community has tended to swing rather towards more and more conservative (lower case "c") interpretations in the last decade or so. This still leaves me some room for change (I did start wearing jeans again....). But for shabbat, I don't see how I can, say, start writing, and say that I buy into the rest of the system, except this. Which leaves me with ditching the system altogether, which I don't want to do. (There's that absolutism again.)
Sometimes practice feels hollow, and how I feel about (for instance) davening (praying), and what I feel while davening, is changing, but it still has some meaning, even if just tying me to a group I belong to. And on good days it feels like more than that. On good days, kavannah days (Kavannah means intent, but also focus. It's one of those words that emphasizes to me that language can shape how people think, because there's no really good translation. Perhaps being in the "zone" comes close, too.), things are great. And even though those seem to fewer and farther between now, I remember them, and wish they came more frequently.
I've been thinking about halachic change a lot over the last months. Some things I've changed a bit (the jeans, again, and what I'll eat out), while others seem to be set in stone, rather. A friend asked if all the changes would be in dress and food, and I realized that most of the practical upshots of any change in how I choose to interpret halacha are likely to be in those areas, but it's still the underlying change that's important.
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