Blog/June 2009/Jun 5th

June 5th (See this week's devar torah)
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Hi again!

Shavuot followed by shabbat was very restful. The weather wasn't too hot, and the food -- the food! -- was wonderful. We had guests over for one meal, and it was overall just a fine yom-tov. I hope yours was as well!

There is a synagogue in the final stages of construction just a few houses away from us. Because of its proximity, I will probably be going there most of the time. When I mentioned that to two separate people over shabbat/yom-tov -- one of them an "important" person, I got the response, "you would pray there? It's a sephardi shul!". To which my response was, "prayer is prayer", and it makes little difference to me any more where I pray as long as there is a minyan of kosher Jews. I find this "Ashekanzi superiority complex" very disturbing, but I've grown used to it. I only wish I understood its source.

This week there was a country-wide defense exercise, simulating simultaneous attacks on Israel from several fronts as well as country-wide terrorist attacks. As part of the exercise, we were supposed to go to our "shelter room". We don't have a "shelter room", since our house was built before they became mandatory. But each neighborhood has a bomb-shelter -- the only problem being we had no idea where ours was! Fortunately, our neighbors did know -- and we found out the shelter is at the end of the building. We hope and pray that we won't have to use it, but it's good to know that there's one available if needed. If more of the Islamic world were like Khaled Abu Toameh we wouldn't have to conduct such drills.

You might think that we had enough food over the Shavuot holiday and shabbat immediately afterwards -- and you would be right! Nevertheless, I tried my hand at making lamb shawarma. It was a whole production, as you can see from the pictures... but definitely worth it! Today I recycled leftover lamb into a kind of bulgogi side-dish for shabbat.

Just FYI: חמי עין גדי does not mean "Ein Gedi hotties". Sarah came up with that helpful translation this week. What it means is "Ein Gedi hot-springs" -- much less likely to get you in trouble. But given the hot weather right now, I don't know why one would want to soak in hot-springs.

Anyway, I've still got some prep-work to do before shabbat, so...

Until next week,
Shabbat shalom!

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