Much thanks to Batya for organizing this carnival. And including links to two of my posts! My first posts on a carnival! (I didn’t know what a carnival was before this, but it’s a very fun way to find out about other bloggers).
We have a new borough council member in Highland Park: Padraic Millet. Padraic says he is stepping up to do his civic duty. Best wishes to you in this endeavor.
Story from Home News Tribune:
By TOM CAIAZZA
STAFF WRITERHIGHLAND PARK — The Borough Council appointed a new member to replace departing council member Fern Goodhart on the same night Mayor Meryl Frank was sworn in for an unprecedented third term.
Padraic Millet, a committee member for borough Democrats who is a facilities administrator for Rutgers University, was sworn in as councilman during Monday’s council reorganization meeting. Millet, 49, was chosen over two other candidates selected by the Democratic Committee as possible replacements for Goodhart.
Millet, a borough resident for 14 years, has several years’ experience serving on the Zoning Board and the Democratic Committee. He said civic duty was his reason for standing as a candidate.
“Now I’m stepping up to do my part,” he said.
Millet, who will use his construction background to head up the borough’s Code Enforcement Committee, said his desire to be a councilman is simple.
“I live on a quiet, dead-end street on the south side of town,” he said.
“It’s worth working to keep.”
As she begins her third term as mayor, Frank views her November election as a confirmation that the public approves of the groundwork set over the last eight years.
“I think the message was loud and clear,” Frank said, “that the people like the way the community is going, and they want to continue it.”
She said the third term may not consist of the sweeping policies that have defined her first two terms in office but will involve efforts to ensure that work continues.
“This third term is a confirmation that we are on the right track,” she said.
Millet replaced Goodhart, the winner of an uncontested re-election bid in November. She resigned to take a year-long fellowship in Washington, D.C., with the American Health Association. Goodhart plans to move to the Washington, D.C., area for the year and will be unable to conduct her duties as councilwoman.
…and then it all turned to rain.
This week’s parsha, Parshat Beshalach, is full of women heroes. We’ve got Miriam singing in the Torah portion. Then in the haftorah, Devorah leads the people, Yael tricks and kills Sisera, and Sisera’s mother cries:
“Why is his chariot so long in coming?
Why don’t I hear the clatter of his chariots?”
She is just darn convinced her son is going to show up again. But he doesn’t. He’s dead.
Turns out, that we blow the shofar on Rosh Hashana 100 times because according to tradition, she cried 100 times. How interesting, that this woman about whom we know so little, other than she was the mother of the story’s “bad guy”, can have such an influence. Maybe it speaks to the power of a woman’s emotional world? And how if it’s a mother, even our rabbis can relate to her pain? Somehow, the crying at the loss of a son (or the not knowing where a son is?) is related to our crying unto God?
Yael Unterman wrote an essay on the topic of “The Voice in the Shofar: A Defense of Deborah” published in Torah of Our Mothers: Contemporary Jewish Women Read Classical Jewish Texts. Yael Unterman proposes that the only reason why we even know about em Sisera, the mother of Sisera, is because of Deborah’s song. Furthermore, Deborah knew that Sisera was dead, long before Sisera’s mother knew. Deborah is called “em beYisrael”, in parallel to em Sisera. Literally, em beYisrael means mother in Israel, but Radak suggests here it means mother to Israel. Deborah, too, is a mother…mother to all of Israel.
So why, according to Yael Unterman, is em Sisera chosen to take central role in associations surrounding the shofar blowing on Rosh Hashana, equal or maybe even superseding Sarah?
Sarah is crying for what has already happened… if she did believe her son Isaac is dead, she crying in grief; if she is aware he is alive, she is crying in shock. About em Sisera, Yael Unterman writes:
As we watch her, we know her son is already dead; and on one level, em Sisera knows this too and her signs and groans are, like Sarah’s, that of a mother who has actually lost her son. Yet on another level, she is still at a point in time where she may reassure herself, imaginging her son is still alive and is victoriously bringing home the booty.
(snip)
…em Sisera’s condition of dialectical emotions and time-frames is a model for us as we hear the shofar on Rosh Hashanah: it evokes grief and loss, but also hope. The groan of the shofar arouses deep feelings of alienation and lack of sense of self: on the Day of Judgement we are stripped of our standing and of the delusions we hold dear the rest of the year…
There is much more to Yael Unterman’s essay, but perhaps I got you interested enough to read it yourself. I took a peek at Yael’s website and discovered she is working on a biography of Nehama Leibowitz.
To finish up this post, I would like to remind (or inform, as the case may be) you of the ritual of dipping one’s finger in the wine cup on Pesach to take out a bit of wine. Even the though the Egyptians drowned in the sea, they are still human beings, and we cannot be completely happy at the death of our enemies.
I took a cue from blogger me-ander and decided to photograph part of last night’s dinner. Well, only the final product, not the process and ingredients.
Here are the ingredients for this vegan, pareve soup:
Put enough olive oil in a pot to cover the bottom. Chop your vegetables. Heat the pot, and then put in the onions. Saute until they are translucent. Add chopped yam, chopped carrot, then chopped zucchini. Add salt, pepper, thyme to taste. Add tomato sauce. Stir, so the yummy olive oil permeates the vegetables. Add enough water to cover the vegetables. Cook for about twenty minutes or the vegetables are tender. Add cabbage, beans and snow peas. When the snow peas are soft, it’s time to eat!
Note on napa cabbage: it has thinner, less fibrous leaves than your standard cabbage. I like it for my coleslaw recipe. I put it in the soup because I had leftovers from making the coleslaw for Shabbat. Will post the coleslaw recipe at some point…
My daughter tasted it, thinking it was chicken soup. I told her it was chicken soup without the chicken. She made a face, and asked if she could put some chicken in it. I told her we had none, and tomorrow night I will make chicken soup. Life with children!
My husband and I thought it was delicious.
I discovered a photo blog of a local friend, Mason Resnick. So for some fun, I am linking to some of his posts with Highland Parkers. I found one of my friends in two different photos.
He told me that this is one of his favorite posts: Uh, Mr. Adams You Can’t Take Pictures Here.
Mason likes getting comments, so be sure to leave a comment on his blog. Tell him we want more local pics!
Rabbi Bassous devoted his speech this past Shabbat to learning from the cemetery vandalism in New Brunswick. I missed the speech (my daughter had other plans for me), so I apologize in advance to Rabbi Bassous if I botch my summary of what he said. My husband related to me that he spoke about two topics:
1) Even when you are dead, you may still not be at rest. Vandals can still attack your grave.
2) It is important to raise children from an early age to respect property. This can start with teaching children to pick up a candy wrapper from the floor. Unfortunately, the teens involved in this incident were not raised to respect property.
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My husband pointed out that if the teens were tried in a Jewish Halachic court, they would be considered adults. In the American judicial system, they are considered juveniles.
In my searches on the web, I discovered that cemetery desecration is all too common a pastime for some teens. Clearly, there are a lot of parents out there NOT teaching their children to respect property, especially buried dead people. On one forum, I found young men bragging about their exploits, and saying the only reason why this is getting such publicity is because it is a Jewish cemetery. Sad. And scary.
This week my husband asked:
Why is the Korban Pesach (the sacrificial lamb) roasted?
You can come up with your own answer, but his answer was because it is a sign of a rich person. When you roast a piece of meat, much of the fat drips away. A poor person would lament the loss of much of the meat. But a rich person is OK with parting with all that fat. It is yet another sign of freedom.
Which reminds me that when I started this blog, I intended to write about food and “you are what you eat”. So I’ll get started here, by saying: pay attention to how you cook the food, as well. Quick broiling is a healthy way of cooking. I am a big fan of steaming vegetables; I own three steamer inserts for my pots.
So maybe I haven’t blogged much about food, food choices and cooking methods because it comes across too preachy. And also, if you think my family only eats healthy food, hah! We do (the adults, anyway) have a tendency to sit around and discuss the junk food after we eat it. My eldest son at a young age could read the sugar amounts on cereal boxes and complain that the ones I bought did not have enough sugar.
I’ll save my complaints about kosher bakeries and hydrogenated fat for another post.
When I was in 5th grade, I had to write a paper on a plague. One of the ten plagues. So I chose Darkness, חֹשֶׁך . I remember drawing dark figures on yellowy manila construction paper. Sort of the like the image on the right.
The inspiration for this is Rashi’s commentary that there were two three day periods of the darkness. Why should it say ‘three days’ twice? During the first period the Egyptians could not see each other. During the second, no man could arise from his place.
I remember trying to visual people being paralyzed in their places. I also have a vague memory of classmates joking about Egyptians being stuck on a toilet, if that’s where they were.
So now as an adult, I like viewing the division of darkness into three types: physical, emotional and spiritual. The physical is what I have already described. Emotional would be like depression; one feels in a deep, dark gloom, but then when the darkness lifts, the feeling is freedom. Finally, for the spiritual or moral darkness, I will quote Rabbi Jonathan Sacks:
The greatest god in the Egyptian pantheon was Ra or Re, the sun god. The name of the Pharaoh often associated with the exodus, Ramses II, means meses, “son of” (as in the name Moses) Ra, the god of the sun. Egypt – so its people believed – was ruled by the sun. Its human ruler or Pharaoh was semi-divine, the child of the sun-god.
In the beginning of time, according to Egyptian myth, the sun-god ruled together with Nun, the primeval waters. Eventually there were many deities. Ra then created human beings from his tears. Seeing, however, that they were deceitful, he sent the goddess Hathor to destroy them; only a few survived.
The plague of darkness was not a mofet but an ot, a sign. The obliteration of the sun signaled that there is a power greater than Ra. Yet what the plague represented was less the power of G-d over the sun, but the rejection by G-d of a civilization that turned one man, Pharaoh, into an absolute ruler with the ability to enslave other human beings – and of a culture that could tolerate the murder of children because that is what Ra himself did.
When G-d told Moses to say to Pharaoh, “My son, my firstborn, Israel” He was saying: I am the G-d who cares for His children, not one who kills His children. The ninth plague was a Divine act of communication, that said: there is not only physical darkness but also moral darkness. The best test of a civilization is: see how it treats children, its own and others’. In an age of suicide bombing and the use of children as instruments of war, it still is.
Newswire update:
New Brunswick, NJ – Four teenagers have been arrested in connection with the damage done to nearly 500 headstones at the Jewish cemetery, a rabbi from one of the two synagogues that uses the cemetery said.
Received through a synagogue email:
The Jewish Federation of Greater Middlesex County stands with the community in expressing shock and sadness at the desecration and vandalism at the Poile Zedek Cemetery in New Brunswick.
Federation has teamed with Congregation Poile Zedek, Congregation Etz Ahaim, Rabbis, cemetery officials and the organized Jewish community to assess the damage and provide the support necessary to begin to heal and rebuild. We have approached law enforcement officials, the Mayor of New Brunswick, and the county prosecutor’s office in an effort to maintain open lines of communication. Federation, representing a united Jewish community, is in pursuit of a full-scale, rigorous investigation into this heinous crime, which is an affront to us all.
As we examine all avenues of effectively providing aid and comfort to those impacted and concentrate on putting together a formal plan of action, we are confident that we can count on your support during this trying time for our community. In that vein, we have established a fund for the repair and restoration of the cemetery. Donations can be sent to the Jewish Federation of Greater Middlesex County, earmarked “Cemetery Restoration Fund”. 100% of your donation will be directed toward this fund. Our address is 230 Old Bridge Turnpike, South River, NJ 08882. If you need more information, contact us at 732-432-7711 or [email protected]. You may also donate on line by logging onto our website at JewishMiddlesex.org.