In better news, we went to a New Moon Rising concert in person!





A tallit-and-tefillin-wearing woman in a traditional Conservative synagogue?! An unorthodox—and non-orthodox—perspective on Jews and Judaism from a perpetual misfit. This blog, welcoming the entire Jewish community, is dedicated to those who take Judaism seriously, but not necessarily literally.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-gun-law-new-york-second-amendment/
In a 6-3 ruling [dated June 23, 2023, regarding a Second-Amendment case], the Supreme Court reversed a lower court decision upholding New York's 108-year-old law limiting who can obtain a license to carry a concealed handgun in public. Proponents of the measure warned that a ruling from the high court invalidating it could threaten gun restrictions in several states and lead to more firearms on city streets.
https://apnews.com/article/abortion-supreme-court-decision-854f60302f21c2c35129e58cf8d8a7b0
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Friday [June 24, 2022] stripped away women’s constitutional protections for abortion, a fundamental and deeply personal change for Americans’ lives after nearly a half-century under Roe v. Wade. The court’s overturning of the landmark court ruling is likely to lead to abortion bans in roughly half the states.
From a meme posted by Ken Levy on Facebook on June 24, 2022: America: where life begins at conception, and ends in Elementary School.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/capital-punishment
Mishnah Makkot 1:10: "A Sanhedrin that puts a man to death once in seven years is called a murderous one. R. Eleazar ben Azariah says 'Or even once in 70 years.' R. Tarfon and R. Akiva said, 'If we had been in the Sanhedrin no death sentence would ever have been passed';
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) ruled, in the same week, that laws designed to prevent criminals from carrying concealed guns in public were unconstitutional and that a previous decision intended to protect a woman’s right to control her own body was also unconstitutional. So now, millions of women in the United States will die due to dangerous pregnancies, or will have their lives changed against their will by being forced to bear babies even when they’re not psychologically or fiscally prepared to raise children, or, in some states, even if the pregnancy resulted from incest or rape. Not only have women been reduced to baby breeders, we’re breeding babies for target practice. If those two decisions don’t make SCOTUS a murderous court, I don’t know what does.
As I posted here in 2019, "". . . it doesn't matter how long ago you gained your rights--the "ruling" male class can always take them away, or so constrict them by passing subsequent laws that, for all practical purposes, they no longer exist." 😡
I'm a sucker for harmony. Isn't this gorgeous? Thank you, Rabbi Micah Shapiro.
Hear more here.
In case you missed this wonderful concert, have a listen to Elana Arian, Deborah Sacks Mintz, and Chava Mirel, collectively known as New Moon Rising.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ_y67VGlTk&ab_channel=LowellMilkenCenter-MAJE
My husband reminded me that I first learned to lein the third chapter of Megillat Ruth (the Book of Ruth) when we were members of the SAJ, so I’ve known it for at least 30 years. But this year, I didn’t get a chance to lein it, because one of our co-congregants protested that it wouldn’t be fair for me to chant the chapter in Hebrew when they, an Israeli-American, would be the only congregant who would understand it. Everyone else has been willing to read along in the translation all these years. Why this became an issue this year is an interesting question. In any case, I guess there’s no point in me practicing leining Megillat Ruth anymore.😢
It gets better, quoth she sarcastically.
The good news is that we actually had a minyan by the time we were ready to do the Torah reading, which isn’t a given, these days—we have to read the Torah reading from a Chumash roughly half the time. The bad news is that my husband, who's the acting rabbi, couldn’t get a single soul to carry the second scroll. So, for lack of an alternative, I had to do the job myself despite the fact that I’m still in physical therapy from having injured both knees last September. So there we were, a 73-year-old with bad knees carrying a 25-pound scroll and an 80-year-old carrying a 35-pound scroll. (We haven’t attended an in-person Simchat Torah celebration since Fall 2019, so I haven’t carried a scroll in literally two and a half years, and I’d forgotten what a challenge that is.)
And, of course,
since my husband couldn’t get anyone else to *carry* the second scroll, he couldn’t get
anyone else to *lift* it, either, so he ended up being the magbiah for both scrolls, too. Yep, in our shul, 80-year-olds do the heavy lifting. 😠
And lest you
think that there’s such a thing as rest for the weary, he had to chant the
haftarah, as well.
By the end of the service, we felt as if we were carrying the weight of the shul on our shoulders. Overworked and underappreciated: that's us.
We were rescued by the Parks Department, of all people. While we were taking an afternoon walk, we noticed that a giant movie screen had been set up in the local park—it turned out that they were doing a free public screening of “Encanto.” So we ended our Shavuot outdoors under the stars watching a movie. That was the most fun we’d had all day. What a way to end a holiday.
From my May 29, 2020 at 10:37 AM Facebook post regarding the mass murder at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas:
"Lest anyone think that we don't make sacrifices to Molech anymore . . .I was looking on my blog for a different post, and found American Akeidah. This post is dated Tuesday, August 06, 2019--apparently, I've been thinking about the Molech connection for years. 😢
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