I do some minor maintenance work periodically for my landlord and landlady-- watching out for suspicious characters, changing locks, picking up trash, etc.-- and I just wrote them a note to say that everything appears to be in order. In other words . . . kol b'seder.
Do you think English got this phrase from Hebrew? Vice versa? Is it just part of a universal human longing for things to fit, to be arranged or categorized, to make sense?
In other news, my back hurts, a lot, and my neck muscles decided, over Shabbos, to start doing this weird contracture-y thing where I couldn't lift my chin more than about three inches off my chest without stabbing pain, and I'm still feeling the aftereffects. Am I "out of order," simply in need of the physical equivalent to Dewey Decimal? Can my body just not find the right system to organize all the mess of me?
The thought occurred to me that perhaps this was my reminder that Shabbos is really for Torah study, not rereading Harry Potter books 1-5. Or even that if I'm going to read Harry Potter books 1-5 on Shabbos instead of devoting all my time to Torah, I should at least not spend the time trying to find a textual basis for Harry Potter hooking up with Professor Snape in book 7 as a logical character-continuous plot twist. (sigh) Then I collapsed into bed about fifteen minutes after havdalah with my neck still stiff and jolting me every time I moved, and promptly passed out and forgot to count the Omer.
Boruch Hashem for my Chasidim who brought me into practice, and whose practice is that a person can still count, albeit without the blessing, after an entire day of forgetting.
Do you sometimes feel the law of entropy is at work, large-scale, in your life?
1 comment:
Had to laugh when I read this. When I was writing Harry Potter and Torah I was so tempted to re-read the Harry Potter books every Shabbat. "It's for a holy purpose" I kept telling myself. Sometimes it takes a neckache to get our creative yetzer hara to leave us alone.
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