Busy

Today, besides class, I went to two really impressive senior sermons (given by friends of mine- one in shiur format on the Rambam and Conversion, the other in a more classic sermon format, well, sort of, with help from shirei_shibolim, lookingforzen, and another cantorial student), taught Hebrew school (after the train I was going to take broke down, so I was on the local train instead, which took quite a while- I got good reading done for my own classes, but didn't have the time to prepare that I'd like), and went to an hour of swing dance lessons.

Teaching went much better than expected- my kippah crocheting class mostly got the hang of slip-knots, and started to get crocheting chains, and my lifecycle class played a very energetic game of My Stumper Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur Trivia Game. I'd planned to also do a worksheet, a discussion, and a 3 minute text discussion, but we had a bit less time than planned, and the game was going really well, so we just stuck with it. I think I'm going to use it again with my Rosh HaShanah services, as a closing activity or something, if I have time to spare.

It was really nice to get back into some swing lessons too. I love Israeli, but it's also nice to do something where I get to focus on technique.

The second senior sermon is one I want to think more about- it was about believing in a G-d who cares, basically- a G-d who is disappointed if I don't daven, or eat treif, a G-d who hears prayer. The point was that a lot of JTS gets into the G_d is Transcendent and therefore uninvolved thing, and that isn't a required Jewish thing. I really appreciated hearing it. It made me think- because I'm pretty constantly fighting out where my beliefs really fit on that spectrum. I certainly believe that G-d hears prayer and cares about what we do, but as to what I think about how G-d responds to prayer, or what the response is to our actions, or why G-d cares about them- that's where I get kind of torn. So- it's a good prompt for me to be thinking about, especially-but-not-only at this time of year...

Just A Thought

I'm running off to mincha and class, but here's a cool thought. I was just reading about philosophy and law and their difference over the value of the idea of precedent. One of the theories brought is that precedent allows law to create an equality between people, because it would be unfair to give different responses to different people just because they happen to live at different times, and thus precedent creates a standing response to the same situation, so that time does not cause two otherwise parallel cases to be judged differently. Well, presuming that Torah is divine law, this fits beautifully with a view of G-d as being able to deal with time as a dimension like any other, i.e. for G-d to potentially be "outside" of time as we experience it, which is an idea that has always made a lot of sense to me.