Email Fodder

September 28, 2001-Surviving

Congratulations to all of you who survived Yom Kippur. I hope you had an easy fast. David walked in today with his pulpit size high holiday prayer book and stashed it in a suitcase. It was a good feeling to have that behind us. Now maybe we can start to loosen up and get more free time. Free time will come only if we plan for it now.

Congratulations also to Tom for being the only contestant who bothered to answer the question from the Millionaire show about spotted dick. The answer is that spotted dick is a pudding. He also said that for obvious reasons there was some pressure to change the name to “spotted Richard.”

Slowing

Things have really slowed down. It’s Friday afternoon and we just got back from the grocery store. David is sitting out on the balcony with a “tikkun” learning tomorrow’s Torah portion. A “tikkun” is a book that has the Torah writings in two columns opposite each other. One column has the text as it appears in the Torah, without vowels, and the other column has it with vowels. He says that this portion is difficult because it’s poetry.

I had a great morning. I love living in this village-like atmosphere. I walked over to get a haircut across the street and on my way home I stopped at the convenience store in our building to buy flowers for Shabbat dinner tonight at the home of a congregant. David says he loves living over a “refrigerator.” The other night he wanted ice cream so he went downstairs and bought a “Nutty Buddy” cone.

Although we’re not going to Syd and Janet Bruce’s home tonight, we have a standing Shabbat invitation there. They have family over every week, so two more is no trouble. We also have a standing invitation to join them on Wednesday nights for Thai food at the restaurant up the street. We really enjoy their company. After services Syd told me that he’d never met a rabbi before who agreed with his politics. I said that a few months ago David’s politics were different. Syd said that his were too. I guess they’re evolving in the same direction.

September 29, 2001-Sharing

I think that the people here do things just so I can have material to email to you all. Our host tonight was the woman who told us about the visiting rabbi in Brisbane whose American accent wasn’t as thick as ours. As it turns out, he’s an Israeli.

That’s the least of our email “sharing time.” At Shabbat dinner last night we met Hiroko, a Japanese exchange student. She is 17 years old and is living with the parents of Marcus, the one-year-old redhead. They are also the couple trying to get pregnant. Hiroko will be learning her English from a family that speaks heavily accented Australian with Yiddish terms thrown in. I doubt she will be able to distinguish Yiddish from English. Hiroko is now going to school in Australia where they spell words differently than she has been taught in Japan. In Japan they use American spelling (color not colour). She has been to Yom Kippur and Shabbat services so that Hebrew can be thrown into the mix of languages. At dinner she ate several large helpings of challah topped with chipped liver. When we left, she was corn rowing the hair of our host’s 13-year-old daughter. Everyone is enjoying the multi-cultural experience even if it involves cultures they didn’t expect to be represented.

Now for the 13 year old daughter of our hosts. She was the one having her hair corn rowed by the Japanese exchange student. I should preface this by saying that she’s a seemingly lovely young woman. She’s an athlete and proficient as an actor in theatrical productions. Her parents claim she is nervous and sensitive. I believe they also described her as high strung. For a little background, I need to tell you she was the only live birth out of 6 stillborns this couple had. They refer to them as their “dead babies.” We’d been privy to an after dinner conversation recounting the tales of each birth, death, and burial with attendant complications of where to bury, whether to sit shiva, and will a rabbi do the funeral.

As a toddler this daughter, their only living child, was a bit squeamish when going to the doctor. That didn’t seem unusual but then she had to be sedated at age 3 ½ to have a cavity filled. When they told about taking her to the emergency room with possible appendicitis my ears perked up. I expected she would freak out in those surroundings. Just the air of tension in an ER would send a calm person’s pulse racing. She threw a tantrum and staged a non-negotiable rebellion with unconditional demands. This 13 year old cannot abide white sheets. That was it. She would not get into the bed until they changed the sheets to a non-white color. I rest my case. The email angel is blessing me with these odd stories.

Telling

Odd too is the way light switches work here. It’s funny how our minds get wired to direct our bodies to take action. You look left, right, left to cross the street. We do the opposite here. You ride up escalators on the right and go down on the left. We do it the other way around. You walk into a room and flick the light switch up to turn on the lights. Would you believe that just because we’re hanging on upside down light switches turn on by flipping down? When I go into the bathroom in the middle of the night I still fumble.

David was too burned out to write a sermon last night so he did an “Ask the Rabbi.” He loves that format. One of the questions was about how the holidays of Succoth differs here and in Akron. He told the story about the time when the temple in Akron was undergoing extensive renovation. The building inspectors were there almost every day. As Sukkoth approached, one of the inspectors saw that the skeleton of a new structure was going up on the vacant lot next to the temple. He asked to see the permits for it. When none were produced, he slapped a “stop work order” on the structure. It turned out that it was the sukkah that was in question. That is the temporary booth-like structure that has the roof open to the stars and is built during Sukkoth. It’s decorated with branches and fruits and vegetables of autumn. It symbolizes the dwellings erected by the Children of Israel as they fled across the desert to escape the Egyptians. David called the mayor who asked him how long the sukkah would be there. When he was told it would be only a week, he told David to forget about it. David left the stop work order on the sukkah so that every year thereafter it was part of the decoration. The Aussies got a kick out of that. But what gives us a charge is that it’s spring here when we’re celebrating a fall harvest holiday. They decorate with apples and paper chains, but not squash. They’ve never heard of Indian corn. I guess the Children of Israel hadn’t heard of it either.

Toby