Learning schedule

I've finally decided (b"n, of course) to get together a real actual study schedule, in hopes it'll make me more inclined to study instead of using all my free time to play basketball or pick my nose or read such mussar classics as "Coming Up From the Down-Low," by JL King (which, don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed and thought was meaningful). But it's time to get on the bus. The Daily Daf bus.

MONDAY NIGHT:
-- daf yomi, which currently means Yevamot, which I hate, but I'm going to be brave and also try to find a chevrusa. So. Does anybody want to learn Yevamot with me?
-- a couple pages of Mesillat Yesharim
-- a couple pages of the parsha, with my chumash

TUESDAY NIGHT:
-- daf yomi
-- Mesillat Yesharim
-- parsha study with my chevrusa!

WEDNESDAY NIGHT:
-- daf yomi
-- Mesillat Yesharim
-- parsha

THURSDAY NIGHT:
-- daf yomi
-- Mesillat Yesharim
-- parsha study at the Chabad!

!SHABBOS!
-- anything and everything

SUNDAY NIGHT:
-- daf yomi
-- Mesillat Yesharim
-- parsha

It's not super-ambitious-- I'm not doing Rambam or Tehillim, and I could be doing more-- but I think it's a good start. Maybe it's a good start because it's not super-ambitious. Mitzvah goreret mitzvah, etc.

"All of the things we want each other to be, we never will be, and that's wonderful, and that's life."

It's Akon. You can bank on it.

Can somebody tell me why the filthiest filthiest hiphop songs make really good tunes for "Lecha Dodi"?

Akon, "Smack That." You know the part where he goes "Smack that, all on the floor / Smack that, give me some more / Smack that, till you get sore / Smack that, o-o-o-o-oh"? "Lecha, lecha dodi / likrat, likrat kalah / p'nei, p'nei Shabbat / Shabbat nekabela."

Beenie Man, "Dick." The part that's all "They don't know dick like you know dick / Dick is your dearest friend / They don't love him when he's in bed / Kiss him and play with his head." "Lecha, lecha, lecha dodi / likrat, likrat kalah / p'nei Shabbat nekabela / p'nei Shabbat nekabla." Or even "Lecha dodi, likrat kalah / p'nei Shabbat n'kabla / lecha dodi, likrat kalah / p'nei Shabbat n'kabla."

Oh my.

How Beautiful

As should be obvious from the blog title, if nothing else, I'm a Jew.

So why do I still love Christian music so much?

Songs that I have missed, and that I sang today:

1. Of the Father's Love Begotten
2. O G-d, You Search Me and You Know Me (dash not in original title) -- by Bernadette Farrell, who is a nun, for crying out loud.
3. How Beautiful, by Twila Paris ("how beautiful the heart that bled/that took all my sin/and bore it instead")-- and I cried, for real, while listening to it.
4. Angels We Have Heard on High (sing with me, now: "Gloooo-ooooo-oooo-oooo-ooo-ooo-ria! in excelsis Deo!")
5. Jesus Christ Is Risen Today (need I say more?)
6. I'll Fly Away
7. By and By
8. Abide With Me ("hold thou thy cross before my failing eyes/shine through the gloom, and point me to the skies")
9. Write Your Blessed Name
10. Were You There When They Crucified My Lord
11. Ave Verum Corpus Natum (ooo! Latin dead-Jesus imagery!)
12. Give Me Jesus
13. Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing
14. Lift Every Voice and Sing
15. You Never Let Go
16. like everything Yolanda Adams ever recorded.
17. Wayfaring Stranger
and the list goes on.

Is it because when I start feeling stuck or shut off, I revert to familiar ways of feeling . . . well, feeling anything about Hashem? Am I drawn to the drama of my former Christianity? Or is it the sound more than the words, what I'm used to, what has emotion associated with it, a history?

I know my brother char beautiful, marked mortal on his forehead, and I know my father jumpy-broke in the back pews, all his candles in the box in the back of his closet, his black-bead rosary glossy dark, his statues all with the hands snapped off, and I know my mother kneeling, skeptical, hair going gray, then white, without change, decision for belief or un-. I know a beautiful woman whose baby in her belly kicked at the sound of my singing from the choir loft above, who made me wise and made me worry and made me her wife, who's never been inside my shul and who raised that baby, our son, unbaptized but in my Church and my church, till we left-- churches, each other, our senses, briefly. I made promises to her and to trees and to G-d and to Jesus, and never stood under a chupah.

I don't know tallitot, really, the same way I know albs, and Aleinu's familiar but foreign, a learned quantity that maybe comes from my blood but wasn't taught. The first time I heard Shema, I fell on my face-- first time I heard Our Father, I was fetal. What's real to me? What I know from reason, revelation, or what's intuitive by now, invisible, what I'm used to, what still stirs me up, pushes buttons the other doesn't even know about? I feel known inside my Catholicness, and strange, sometimes, in what I've chosen for myself. I am, after all, a ger, in Torah's own words-- a newcomer, stranger, sojourner. I can still go back . . .

And other days I'm convinced I'll flip out Chasidish-style, go straight, shake off my girlfriend, marry some beautiful man named Yossi and have fourteen babies.

Extremes, is it maybe, the pull of the outsides and the fringes?

I can see why tzitzit go where they do.

Crooks beware

Beautiful slogan on a rock out front of one of the houses near 5th and Constitution, the one where the inhabitants publish "G-DS VERIFIED NEWS-- Hot! Comprehensive!" (minus a dash) every morning, give or take, on a plywood sign in their front yard:

G-d and ammo
will reveal crooks.

Something Real

That's what she's looking for, she said.

Read Torah, I suggested.

You read Torah to me.

English or Hebrew?

Hebrew.

You don't speak Hebrew.

I don't need to, she answered. I just want to hear it. To hear you.

And we were working our way through Melachim, breaking idol altars, when it got quiet, and she laughed, and she looked at me, and I smiled and she looked soft and she said Are you going to come over here and give me our first kiss?

Now I blush like fire every time I look at her.

Does a person say "Chag sameach" on Lag BaOmer?

If so, chag sameach to you.

If not, happy Lag BaOmer, or good yontif, or whatever it is a person says to another in order to recognize happiness of a day along with continued good wishes for the other person's well-being.