Andrew Greene

This evening, I will complete the eleven months of saying kaddish for my father. While I remain an avel, a mourner, for another month, in Jewish traditon kaddish is not recited for the last month of the year of mourning.

So at the end of the 7:50 mincha service, I will say kaddish. And at the end of the 8:05 arvit service, I will respond to the kaddish recited by others.

People have asked me how I feel about it, and it's a mixed bag. But one thing that I'm certain of: I'm looking forward to being able to say "Aleinu", the prayer before kaddish, at my own pace, without rushing to make sure I'll be ready to say "Yitgadal".

I don't hold by mystical interpretations of kaddish. I know that for some, there is a concept of an immediate afterlife, and they have the idea that every time a child says kaddish, the soul of the parent ascends one level, and their goal is to ensure that they say kaddish at least enough times to elevate their parent's soul from "doomed to purgatory" to "ensured a place in the next world." Almost sounds like a rule out of Dungeons and Dragons, doesn't it?

That's not how I see kaddish.

A co-worker who lost his mother a few months ago commented to the effect that his mother, a devout Catholic, could now talk to God directly. And in the broader culture in which we live, there is an amorphous concept that the living can ask the dead to intercede on their behalf, that they are somehow closer to God than we are.

That's not the Jewish view. The Psalmist wrote: "The dead do not praise God, nor does anyone who has descended into the grave." My father's ability to pray ended with his last breath eleven months ago. It is we, the living, who can speak words to God --- words of praise and words of anger, words of gratitude and words of despair.

For me, kaddish must have a function in this world, among the living.

And so I have been going to synagogue, twice daily (usually), to say the kaddish that my father cannot. To lead the community in prayer, as my father cannot. To fulfill the fifth commandment, showing respect for my father, in the symbolic act that our people have used for millenia.

In short, to present evidence, through my actions, of what kind of Jew my father was, by demonstrating what kind of Jew my father raised.

And yet that means that, to a greater or lesser degree, my prayers for the last eleven months have not been entirely mine. My father's absence has been a constant companion. About one service out of every six, I have been leading as "the representative of the community," as it is called, which means often I've also been sharing my prayer mindspace with everyone else in the room.

It's gotten crowded in there.

But tonight, at arvit, it will be just me. When I say the "Amen" that concludes my father's one remaining kaddish, the final echo of his voice will fade out, and I will enter the penultimate stage of mourning. I will have to start learning how to leave daily mourning behind, to prepare for the final stage, the one that starts on his first yahrzeit and lasts for the rest of my life.

For the next month, I will be ineligible to lead services both on weekdays (as someone no longer saying kaddish) and on Shabbat and Yom Tov (as one in the year of formal mourning). I intend to use that month to rediscover my own voice, and to find my way back to that quiet, solitary space so I can once again learn how to become intimate with God.

( Cut for spoilers )

My friend Eric Berlin's third YA novel in his series "The Puzzling World of Winston Breen," The Puzzler's Mansion, came out last week. As with the other books in the series, Eric has written a YA mystery whose plot revolves around Winston having to solve puzzles, with additional incidental puzzles dropped in for those who like that sort of thing.

The story was enjoyable, the writing crisp. And Winston is growing up; it's great to see that the Winston of this book has matured compared to when we first met him. He's still friends with Mal and Jake, but their friendship is evolving as well. This not only keeps the narrative fresh, but it help to make Winston believable as a human being.

The context this time is that Winston has been invited to a weekend of puzzle-solving, but someone starts stealing the prizes. It reminded me in a few spots of Dorothy Sayers's Peter Wimsey short story, "The Necklace of Pearls" (which is a good thing). More than that I won't say here.

The first couple of chapters felt a little slow, but once the main event got underway, the pages flew by, and I was sad to reach the end. The puzzles were fun, as one expects from Eric (not just in his books, but in the NYTimes and for the National Puzzlers' League conventions); as in the previous books, though, if solving puzzles isn't your thing, you can just read the book and let Winston solve them for you.

Congratulations to Eric on another fine story. As I said at the top of this review, Eric is a friend of mine, but even if he weren't, I'd highly recommend this book for anyone who is or ever has been a young adult.

I got a sneak peek at the new Koren/Steinsaltz English Talmud Bavli this week. Regular readers of my blog know that I admire both Rabbi Steinsaltz and Koren Publications greatly. I am very pleased to report that this project blew me away, exceeding my expectations. Although I'm sure acquiring the entire set won't come inexpensively, I will find some way to afford to buy these as they come out. They're that amazing. [Disclaimer: Although Koren has been sending me review copies of some of their books, this review is based on a copy that I borrowed for a few days from my rabbi.]

( My review -- long, and with pictures )

I look forward to getting my own copy so I can learn from it. When I do, I'll update this review.

My understanding is that Koren Publishers plans to release the entire set over the course of the next four years, faster than the Daf Yomi schedule. I wish them the financial success they deserve; this edition merits to become the new standard for English-language Talmud study.

Koren Publishers recently sent me a review copy of Mikra and Meaning: Studies in Bible and Its Interpretation by Rabbi Nathaniel Helfgot, one of the books in their new Maggid imprint. ( Review behind the cut )

Despite these shortcomings, though, Rabbi Helfgot and Maggid have given us a book that succeeds on three levels: First, its analyses enhance our understanding of Tanakh. Second, it presents by explanation and by example a new formulation of Torah scholarship. Third, it helps establish Maggid as a home for Modern Orthodox publishing, a much-needed counterbalance to the existing publishers of Orthodox texts.

I highly recommend this book.

I haven't had much to say here about the mourning process in the last few months; I haven't had any observations that seemed worth recording.

But I'm getting towards the end of the eleven months of saying kaddish. Next week, Jews start counting the 49 days of the Omer, the period between Passover and Shavuot. Coincidentally, today, I realized, I start the final 49 days of saying kaddish.

It's a turning point. ( Cut for length )

A gathering of my Pesach links from years past:

• Cleansing -- a poem in free verse
• Hush, Puppies -- a lullaby for the night of the Exodus
• My setting of Hallel Gadol in case you don't already have a catchy tune to use at your seder
• What does it mean to "execute judgment"? -- an exegesis based on something Tani asked two years ago
• The doggerel haggadah -- the key points of the seder, as recounted on Burma Shave signs leading out of Egypt
• Minimal Maggid -- if you've said this much, dayenu! Useful for families with small children and/or impatient relatives.
• What if we had seders at Will's house? -- A crossword puzzle.
• Why is Ha Lachma Anya in Aramaic? -- as with so many things, it's not necessarily the pat answer they taught us as kids
• And another reason why we dip twice
• And two links that are not my own creation. First, Rav Slifkin's excellent monograph on just how much matza do we have to eat, anyway. And finally, one that I love so much I have to share it every year: The sixty-second seder.

Chag kasher v'sameach!

I love the seder, and it saddens me that so many Jews, not having learned why the seder was assembled the way it was, go through the motions but come away feeling that they've done their duty, dry and off-putting as it may be.

For a few years, I've wanted to write a hagadah to address this: no mystical commentary, no midrashic exegesis, just some simple answers to the disaffected child's question: "What does this service mean to you, anyway?" Somehow, I've never gotten the time.

But if I can't do the whole thing from soup to nuts -- er, from wine to wine? -- then I can at least open up a discussion thread here on my blog. What part(s) of the seder do you find alienating or do you wonder about? I'll do my best to answer.

[Feel free to share this link if you wish.]

Thank you to those who have started to rate candidates in my poll of which of my musical compositions should I submit to the Shalshelet festival competition. (To clarify: you don't have to rank them or vote for your favorite: just listen to however many you feel like and rate the ones you've listened to.)

Some of you have contributed comments in your feedback, and I'd like to take a moment to respond ( behind the cut )

If you have a chance to contribute your feedback, I'd be deeply grateful.

The month of Nisan has started, and in a few weeks we will be sitting down to our sedarim. As you may know, I collect haggadot, and each year I try to add at least one to my collection. This year, Koren Publishers sent me a review copy of their newest haggadah, The Koren Ethiopian Haggada: Journey to Freedom / The Gould Family Edition, edited by Rabbi Menachem Waldman. It is a welcome addition.

The title is somewhat misleading, though. The text of the haggadah is the standard Ashkenazi text; this is not an "Ethiopian Haggada" because a fixed rite of seder narrative did not exist, apparently, in their community. What makes this excellent volume "Ethiopian" is that the additional readings and graphic elements tell the story of the modern-day exodus of the Jews from Ethiopia.

( (Cut for length) )

Of course, the mark of a successful seder is that you leave with more questions than you came in with. I opened this Haggadah not knowing that there were questions to be asked, and it has brought me up to the level of "What's this?"

If the worst that can be said about The Koren Ethiopian Haggada is that it leaves me with a world of new questions, then it is a very successful Haggadah indeed.

The Executive Summary

Please help me choose whether to enter a music competition, and which pieces to submit. ( Details behind the cut. )

Thanks!

Today is Taanit Esther, the fast that precedes the holiday of Purim. I will never forget Taanit Esther of 16 years ago. ( Cut for length )

H and I were discussing this last night, and we had a joint insight. I haven't had a chance yet to look in the meforshim [commentators] to see if this is a chiddush [new insight], but: MOshe knew what was going on in the camp. He knew that bnei Yisrael, weeks away from the theophany and being told "Make no molten gods", fell into idolatry, worshipping an object that they had fashioned with their own hands.

How much more tempted would they be to worship idolatrously an object that had been fashioned by the "hands" (as it were) of God?

Did Moshe smash the first tablets to save Israel from future idolatry?

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

My post yesterday was an experiment to see how subtle a puzzle can be while still being detectable as a puzzle. ("Step 1: Solvers notice that there's something odd and deduce that there may be a puzzle lurking here....")

( Cut for length and spoilers )

The lessons I'm taking away from this are these: (1) Being maximally subtle means that the constructor will leave out many people who would enjoy solving the puzzle if they knew one was there. (2) The surface cannot be empty fluff; people who don't notice that it's a puzzle have no reason not to expect it to be of the same quality and interest level as regular content.

One last note: I'm not sure either of these apply in contexts where people are told that there is a "hidden puzzle" somewhere --- whether that's in an issue of P&A magazine, or at the NPL convention.

My previous posting is a puzzle; what I was curious about was how noticeable that would be. The answer was apparently "not very," although a couple of people did notice that it was a puzzle (I will unscreen those comments now; and one person applied the "puzzles" tag to that post) no one indicated to me that they solved it.

A brief question: Does everyone understand, generally, how I organize these LiveJournal messages?

Not obvious?

Please, everyone reply, sharing the (undoubtedly valuable) perspective of your expectations.

( Cut for spoilers.... )

Well, sort of.

Recently, I've had a hard time summoning kavannah, spiritual intention, during my davening. I'm tired, I'm rushing to keep up with the congregation, and saying Amidah under those circumstances at least 22 times a week.... well, it's becoming awfully mechanical.

On her recording Live from the Cafe Carlyle, Sutton Foster talks about one of the challenges of performing in a long-running Broadway hit: how to keep each performance fresh. She has a cup in her dressing room filled with slips of paper with different emotions written on them; before each performance she draws one and she lets that inform her performance that night.

And this week I got the CD of her performance with the Roundabout in Anything Goes. Her rendition of "Blow, Gabriel, Blow" is amazingly inspirational (setting aside the specifics of which religion the lyrics purport to be inspiring).

These two things came together in my mind this afternoon: Can I choose various songs to use as a model of an emotional/mental state while reciting my prayers? I tried to channel the joy that I feel Foster radiates as Reno singing "Blow, Gabriel, Blow" while I recited my mincha Amidah --- and I practically danced through it (without moving my feet, of course).

I may be on to something here.

I've noticed that some of my fellow minyan-goers have various customs of responding with words that are not in the prayer book.

For example, one person responds to "mashiv ha-ruach u-morid ha-gashem" [You cause the wind to blow and the rain to fall] with "... livracha." [... for blessing.]

Another responds to each part of the priestly blessing with the usual "ken yehi ratzon" [May that be Your will] and continues "bizchut Avraham avinu" [in the merit of Abraham our father], then "bizchut Yitzchak avinu" [in the merit of Isaac our father] and finally "bizchut Yaakov avinu" [in the merit of Jacob our father].

It's got me wondering what other liturgical variations are not captured by our prayer books.

A friend from shul called me a few weeks ago with a request. He was invited to give a presentation at the World Economic Forum, and he wanted to use a series of puzzles to engage his audience and demonstrate different forms of collaborative workflows. The way he presented his idea, it was clear to me that he actually had a good grasp on how puzzle solving works, both on the individual and team levels, and how metapuzzles could be used to illustrate his points. The idea was to have three rounds that could be solved between courses during dinner, and his talk would follow the dinner.

If you want to solve the puzzles before reading further, I'll direct you to this PDF which contains all three rounds of puzzles. (The page numbers will indicate which round you're in.)

( Cut for length. )

I hope that you enjoy it.

I subscribe to the NYTimes's "obituaries" alerts. Today's e-mail had four links:

Alert Name: OBITS
January 27, 2012 Compiled: 2:11 AM

* Winston Riley, Jamaican Music Producer, Is Dead at 68
* Eiko Ishioka, Costumer of the Surreal, Dies at 73
* Rudi van Dantzig, Provocative Dutch Choreographer, Dies at 78
* Dance Listings for Jan. 27-Feb. 2

H had a week of intensive workshops this past week, including one on how to teach science. She told me there was one session on "Pirate Science." And even though I don't like pirate jokes, I couldn't resist asking: "You mean PV=nARRRRRR!t? Or 'Walk the Planck's constant!'"

My friend tahnan, a linguist, gets understandably upset when people talk about "untranslatable" words. And yet, I find myself wondering (prompted by gnomi's link yesterday):

How does one translate the TV show title "Srugim"? I mean, would you watch a show called "Knitteds?" (Well, yes, many of you would, but you'd expect Elizabeth Zimmermann to be hosting.)

Last night at our shul we had the first meeting of an experimental minyan. The gist of it was that we were going to have a kabbalat shabbat service using choral settings of Carlebach and Lewandowski melodies, but with the entire community functioning as the chorus. (I.e., this was participatory, not performer-audience.) Our leaders (both shul members) were Josh Jacobson, founder and artistic director of the Zamir Chorale of Boston, and Daniel Jackson.

( Cut for length )

I just posted this comment over at the Dreamwidth news board in response to their SOPA protest response.

---

One of the reasons I have a Dreamwidth account is because I trust you not to get in the way of what I have to say.

You just put that in doubt.

You wrote: While I won't say that we will never do that -- there certainly may come a time when it truly is the best way to protest -- we don't feel comfortable doing that right now.

I read: If we at Dreamwidth ever feel sufficiently upset about something, we just might deny our community members customers the right to publish their ideas. Today is not that day, but someday in the future, that's a possibility we'd consider.

I urge you, as strongly as I can, to walk that back. When you threaten me with the possibility of an arbitrary denial of service, I start thinking about going someplace else. And I really don't want to go anyplace else.

For several years, I've used an MSI Wind netbook. I bought it for our trip to Israel, and it's been my workhorse ever since. That's what I use for my music composition, my siddur typesetting, my crossword construction, my 'ganza solving. The small screen and keyboard and limited CPU and RAM were minor inconveniences more than offset by the fact it was light enough to toss in my bag without a second thought.

Friday, while I was frantically trying to finish cooking for Shabbat and keep tabs on my Mystery Hunt team, I had my netbook open on the kitchen table, which I don't usually do. Tani had gotten himself a glass of water.... and while I was quickly packing my bag for Hunt, I elbowed his glass of water directly onto the keyboard of my netbook.

( Cut for length )

Interestingly, I'm not at all concerned about my data. Between Subversion and Dropbox, I have absolutely no doubt that everything I care about is redundantly backed up. I'm dreading the expense and the hassle of setting up a new computer, if need be, but I'm not worried that fifteen years of work on Pesukei d'Zimrah or Siddur Hiddur Tefillah is lost.

I knew that at some point not only would I be unable to daven with a minyan (that happened, as expected, for Mincha when Daylight Saving Time ended), but that at some point I'd miss a service entirely, even by myself. That happened yesterday, Shabbat afternoon, when I got sick right before mincha time. That was the first amidah that I missed since my father passed away.

Because I'm a data collector, the stats are: the streak lasted 611 services over 191 days, of which 597 were with a minyan. My streak of shacharit with a minyan continues with 191 as of this morning. (I was exempt from shacharit the day of the funeral.)

My son asked a great question the other day: Why is pi between 3 and 4?

It's easy to show why 4 is an upper bound on pi, by inscribing a unit circle in a unit square.

But I have not yet been able to come up with an explanation of why 3 should be a lower bound for pi. Inscribing a square inside the unit circle gives 2.8+, and I suppose I could try higher-order polygons, but does anyone out there have a demonstration that will resonate with a fifth-grader?

Not-ten! Not-nine! Not-eight! ....