Wishing everyone who is celebrating this season a sweet New Year!

(Heck, everyone should have a sweet year! And Happy Birthday, world!)

(Yes, I'm a couple of hours early. But I'm already in countdown mode for making dinner and getting to evening services.)

I actually had a date with the Mr. last night. On a weeknight, too! He had tickets to Zemer Chai, a Jewish choir in which the wife of one of his former bosses sings, and another colleague is a supporter of the group. He'd meant to go with yet another colleague who's into the group (they saw it together last year too) but the other guy couldn't go, so he took me.   XD

This is basically a very good U.S./European-style mixed choir that focuses on traditional European Jewish music from both the Ashkenazi (German/Polish/Russian etc.) and and Sephardi (Italian/Spanish/Turkish) traditions, with some Israeli songs thrown in for good measure. It's generally very melodic and very tightly, elaborately arranged (examples: here and here). In some ways, this was the very antithesis of the Idan Raichel concert I took in with smillaraaq earlier this spring.

I'm making matzoh balls! Even though we have no soup to put them in! I just wanted some, dammit!

When I was growing up, I could never figure out why people made jokes about matzoh balls being like cannon balls, because Mom's weren't. The secret is that her batter is actually pretty loose and runny before it's chilled. Because it's less dense, the final product is lighter as well.

I attended a really great concert last night, with smillaraaq. Israeli artist Idan Raichel, who sings and plays keyboards, brought three vocalists (male Middle Eastern, female Sudanese Israeli of Ethiopian ancestry,* female Ashkenazi Israeli), a Uruguayan percussionist, a Georgian (as in, Transcaucus, not U.S. South) oud/guitar artist, and a Moroccan guitarist, along with a couple of other fellow Israelis on drums and bass. The music is rooted in traditional melodies from a wide variety of cultures - most strongly Near Eastern and Ethiopian (Raichel learned a lot of what he knows from Ethiopian musicians in Israel).

It's delicious, passionate, complex, multi-layered, and often very danceable - more than half the audience erupted from their seats to run down and groove in front of the stage and up the aisles (only to be shooed back to their seats by the Lisner security staff). There were too many lovely moments to remember off the top of my head, but the instrumental showcases that stood out for me were: Rony Iwryn's remarkable percussion solo involving terracotta bowls of various sizes filled with water - he poured it back and forth, tapping and drumming on the bowls with his fingertips and palms, calling forth ravishingly beautiful sounds; Eyal Sela's solos on flute, clarinet (Klezmer-style), and other woodwinds; and Mark Kakun's beautiful instrumental on electric guitar played more like a classical guitar. All three vocalists had immensely powerful melodic voices and were fun to watch as well.

• MySpace page with streaming music and concert tour dates
• Idan Raichel Web site with pictures from the current tour (scroll down - it's the first picture set, the one that's showing in the enlargement frame)
• An amateur video that will nonethless give some idea of what the concert was like (from an earlier concert)

*ETA: I've been reading around the Intarwebs and found out some more about the singer that Raichel introduced as coming from "the refugee camps of Sudan": she is Cabra Casey, born to Jewish Ethiopian parents who had fled to Sudan and eventually ended up in Israel. So my bad, and I certainly made some near-sighted assumptions. >sigh<. Fail better, cho ... .

In our world, in 1938, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes suggested that Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe be settled in Alaska. The measure didn't pass — but in Chabon's book, it did. The number of Jews killed in the Holocaust in this AU was considerably fewer, but the modern state of Israel did not survive its war for independence. In the 70 years since, the Jews of Sitka have developed a Yiddish-speaking culture on the fringe of the frequently frozen wilderness of the north, but now their little world is coming to an end as the U.S. prepares to reclaim the District and cast out the vast majority of its residents. Unsurprisingly, many of the more religious residents of Sitka are once again speaking of the coming of the Messiah.

Against this End Times backdrop, police detective Meyer Landsman becomes obsessed with a murder all too close to home: a chess-playing junkie who was shot execution-style in Landsman's rundown apartment building. Who was this ruined man, and why was he killed? Is there a significance to the chess problem that was left set up in his room? And will Landsman, who has been told by his new supervisor — who is, just incidentally, his ex-wife Bina, for whom he's still carrying a king-sized torch — to consider the case closed because they have to have everything shipshape by the time the U.S. government takes over, ever solve the mystery?

I was reluctant to start this because it sounded too depressing, but I liked it a lot. The grimly funny prose, with its Yiddish sentence structure, just flowed off the page for me, and I found myself grinning or snickering several times each chapter. So it was a shock to look at Amazon's reader reviews — and find that significant numbers of people couldn't get into the book at all, found the language offensive or incomprehensible, and thought it too grim to finish. I guess I need to add YMMV. In my case, this is told in one of several accents with which I grew up (many of my New York cousins and their parents and our grandparents and great-aunts and uncles sounded more or less like this), as well as the style of humor to which I was accustomed. The idea of making terrible, cutting, and even vulgar jokes and humorous insults as the world is ending around you is an old tradition of our people, but clearly it doesn't work for everyone.

whose stories are they?

[Kabbalah] was also an ordinary thing that came up every so often in class or in sermons, tied with gematria. (Gematria is frequently referred to as Jewish numerology as if the discipline were a matter of adding up all the numbers in our name and going "That means you will meet a dark stranger on the beach," instead of a form of investigation into the inner meanings of complex texts that were quite possibly deliberately employing such a system.) In one speech I remember, during a Simchat Torah service, my rabbi stood, carrying the Torah, and rolled it open to the very last word. "The last letter of the last word of the Torah," he said, "is lamed. The first letter of the first word of the Torah is bet. Lamed-bet. Lamed-vet. Lev. The Hebrew word for heart."

"The Torah," he said, "is a beating heart. It beats slowly, once a year. But it's been beating for a long time."

– from nextian

Chances are that I should not be online, as this is a very serious holiday. But I probably will be, because I miss everyone. It's been too quiet lately ... .

Anyway, no food after supper tonight, until services finish at about 7:00pm tomorrow. Theoretically no water, but I need to take some with my pills (which one is permitted to do).

So at the morning Torah service, the Rabbi was talking about the story of Hagar and Ishmael being sent off into the desert by Abraham on Sarah's say-so. And he was discussing the fact that when Sarah talks, she never calls either Hagar or Ishmael by their names: it's "that woman" and "her son."

Which, of course, reminds me of Hakkai's telling observation, in Reload, that Hazel never calls any of the youkai/part youkai members of the ikkou by their names.

Because, as Rabbi said (direct quote), "It's much easier to demonize someone that way."

(Of course, that's also how Gojyo's stepmother always refers to Gojyo's real mother in the flashbacks: "That woman!")

Our office building connects to Union Station, Washington's main RR station. Like most large modern stations, it's like a shopping mall inside, with restaurants and shops, so I usually go there to buy lunch and (before that) to walk rapidly around the ground and upper levels, so that I get a little exercise break.

It's Cherry Blossom Festival, so the place is crawling with tour group mobs, many of them older school children (middle school on up). And their chaperones have enough on their minds that they simply can't seem to keep their mobs from blocking the corridors ... it makes walking more toilsome than it oughter be ...

And of course it's that matzoh time of year again ... when everything's a little more cardboard-y ... .

So all in all, your humble correspondent feels a tendency to bitch-bitch-bitch. > slaps self < Snap out of it!