[Title should probably be something in Hebrew]

because I'm going to talk about my Rosh Hashana experience. But I'd have to pick a title in Hebrew based on my extremely limited knowledge, and I'd probably mispell it or at least mistransliterate it, and probably half of you wouldn't know what it meant, and a small percentage of you would internally correct me. So, I get the self-reflexive best of both worlds. Hah.

Disclaimer: I'm tired, so this may be less coherent even than usual.

So, last night I went to dinner with Rabbi Margaret J----, of the Progressive synagogue here. Turns out that in England, there's the Orthodox, the Reform and the Liberal movements. But the Reform movement is like our Conservative movement, and the Liberal movement is like our Reform. And the Progressive synagogue is Liberal and Reconstructionist. Ok, does anyone else's head hurt? And this is the drastically oversimplified version.

The big news about this synagogue is that its prayerbook has English bits that I actually like. Sorry, VC folks, but I find the
"Here we are
at the start of a new year.
Think of a tree.
God is like a tree
accepting
and non-judging
and possibly femine"
stuff a bit weird. [NB: this is not an actual quotation from the maxor (or whatever the Hebrew/Yiddish word for holiday prayer book is), but my impression and parody of the things I don't like about the maxor, namely its line breaks, oversimplification and use of words rarely more than one syllable, and attempts at political correctness. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm as feminist as the next guy or gal, and probably more so, but Judaism is pretty literally a patriarchal religion, and that's reflected in all the texts. I figure you can either run around changing all the texts like mad and proably extracting everything that's made them compelling as well as patriarchal, or you can say to yourself, yes, this is patriarchal, but I can find in it meaning that applies to my life now. Guess which I prefer. This isn't quite a coherent statement, but it's the jist.

In any case, the rabbi is very nice, and so is her husband and so are her children. They gave me a very nice dinner. Mmm, food I didn't cook myself and don't have to worry that I'm spending more than my budget on.... I'm really not mercenary; I'm just a student.

Ok, top weird/cool thing about the service today [sorry, btw, to anyone who's not Jewish and is getting really bored or confused] was hearing Hebrew pronounced with a British accent. :) I can't render it in print because a. it's tricky to mark an accent b. it's in a language with another alphabet and c. it's also largely the cadence. But it was cool.

Ok, that's about all I can muster at the moment. Think I'll go trundle myself into bed.