Bartender Geek

[This isn't a humor post, or a political post. This is a history/theology geeking post. Just so's y'all know what to expect.]

First off, as you all know, the Number of the Beast is "616", not "666" -- the whole "666" thing is a transcription error. The earliest versions of the Book of Revelations have "616".

Second, as you all know, in Hebrew, every letter also has an associated numerical value, and Hebrew numerology is based around the numerical values of words.

Hebrew Letter	Value	Name	English Approximation of Sound
א	1	Aleph	Silent
ב	2	Bet	B or V
ג	3	Gimmel	G (historically, also could sound as j)
ד	4	Dalet	D (historically, could also sound as djz)
ה	5	Hay	H
ו	6	Vav	V, or oo, or oh (historically, sounded as "w", "oo", or "oh", and was called "waw")
ז	7	Zayin	Z
ח	8	Chet	kh (as in "Bach")
ט	9	Tet	T
י	10	Yod	Y
כ	20	Kaf	K or kh
ל	30	Lamed	L
מ	40	Mem	M
נ	50	Nun	N
ס	60	Samekh	S
ע	70	Ayin	Silent, basically
פ	80	Pay	P or F
צ	90	Tzade	ts, as in "pizza"
ק	100	Kuf	K or Q (a little more gutteral than K)
ר	200	Resh	R, more or less
ש	300	Shin	Sh or S
ת	400	Tav	T, T or S in some dialects, T or Th historically

As an aside, I find it interesting that, historically, the following letters had two sounds:
Bet, B and V (no English equivalent of which I know)
Gimmel, G and J (the English letter "g" maintains both sounds)
Dalet, D and djz as in the French "gendarme" (no English equivalent that I know of)
Kof, K and Kh
Pay, P and Ph
Shin, S and Sh
Tav, T and Th

So, a fair number of the Hebrew two-sound letters made it into English. . .

Anyway, that's not what I'm posting about.

The Book of Revelations is clear that "616" refers to a person's name. So you need to find a name, or name and title, which adds up to 616.

How about קסר נרו ? That's 50+200+6 + 100+60+200 = 616. What are the English equivalents of those letters? NRV QSR. Of course, that "V" may be a "W", a "U" or an "O", and we need to add vowels.

NRO QSR. NeRO CaeSaR.

Hard to argue with that one. Emperor Nero pretty much deserved the title of "the Beast", and, for that matter, was the Emperor when the Book of Revelations was written.

So, my point is to just plain relax about the Book of Revelations. We KNOW what the "number of the Beast" is, and who it refers to, and why. It's not a great End-Times Mystery or anything.

So, we had a seder at our house.

I've got to say, we had a WONDERFUL group of people. I had such a great time, because we had such wonderful guests.

The seder was very simple -- we led out of the Maxwell House haggadah, with occasional snippets from other haggadot. The plan was to start at 7 and finish at 10; we actually started closer to 7:30 and went until 11:30. Which, for Jews, is pretty good.

We would have gone later if people didn't have to do things like sleep and go to work in the morning and stuff like that. I would have loved to keep that whole group of people at our house until 4 in the morning hanging out and singing songs and stuff. But I think several of them would have had their eyeballs explode from lack of sleep if we'd done that. And that would have been bad.

We rushed the post-eating part of the seder, as is all-but traditional, but we actually managed to DO it. Okay, so we did Birkat through Nirtzah in about five minutes flat -- but we DID it.

The food was pretty good. I SUCK at timing things, ("Well, Lis said that the roast would take about three hours, so I should put it in at about five. I put it in at three, to cook for five hours.") but the roast turned out fine, anyway -- I cooked it by thermometer, and turned the oven down to keep-warm once it was to temp. And I guess I didn't dry it out too much, since juices were SQUIRTING out of it when it was cut.

Here's what went wrong with the cooking:
1. With the chicken soup, I used white pepper instead of black pepper. I discovered that I don't like white pepper.
2. I forgot to make soup carrots.
3. The matzah balls were tough enough to require knife and fork to cut -- I don't actually know HOW I made them that dense, but they had a measurable gravitational field.
4. I screwed up the timing on the veal roast. However, I don't know if I can really count this one as a problem, since the roast came out fine, anyway.
5. Again, because of timing, the spinach pie was VERY dried-out.
6. The torte I made for dessert was kind of lopsided and looked weird.

Here's what went right with the cooking:
1. Everything else.

There were a few dishes I'd intended to make but didn't get around to -- sauteed green peppers and garlic, a stuffing for the turkey. But given that we (as anticipated) have more than 50% leftovers (this is deliberate: the plan was to cook for the seder and not have to cook again for the rest of the week), I don't suppose that anyone went TOO hungry.

First, Lis was, unfortunately, wiped out, so didn't come with me. So I went to shul by myself. As Lis couldn't wear the costume I made for her, I wore it instead.

I took an old t-shirt, and drew on it the chemical structures of 3-methylbutyl acetate, octyl butrate, pentyl acetate, methypropyl butate, pentyl butyrate, and a couple other molecule chains of the same family, along with the general formula of

R - C=O
      |
     OR'

Which doesn't look good 'cause I don't know how to do the HTML pretty for chemical structures.

I wore a crown, and, for added verisimilitude, my Mad Scientists Local 42 logo lab coat.

Then I challenged people to guess which Purim character I was.

A good half-dozen or dozen people got it.
( Some pictures and more notes within )

Elizabeth Brook's father is David H. Brooks, a defense contractor who made hundreds of millions of dollars selling sub-par body armor to the United States Army.

Her Bar Mitzvah included Aerosmith, Tom Petty, Kenny G, and 50 Cent as acts. It cost an estimated $10,000,000.

He also stiffed the help, paying them HALF what he agreed to. As Susan Felber realized, her brother, who barbacked the event, made less money for 44 HOURS of work than any one of the guests got in their goodie bags.

My question: can we find out what shul David H. Brooks goes to, and do we have any connections to the rabbi of that shul -- and can we have that rabbi issue a cherem against Mr. Brooks?

(As one comedienne commented, "At the kiddush, Mr. Brooks drank a large glass of the blood of Christian children, just to make certain that he didn't miss any potential offensive stereotypes.")

There comes a level of crudity that turns into a . . . well, the only word that comes to mind is shonda. I mean, no word in English seems to have the emotional impact.

And I think that this is a case where the Jewish community as a whole has to stand up and say that we don't stand for 1) selling substandard body armor to the army of our own country, 2) stiffing the help, or 3) turning a celebration of a religious event into a FUCKING LAUGHINGSTOCK OF OVER-THE-TOP CONSUMERISM. I mean, I can't even find a word in YIDDISH to express what this. . . THING is. "Ungepatch" is far, far to kind. "Shonda fur di goyim" is certainly a part of the problem -- when you act THIS badly, THIS obviously, in ways that reinforce preexisting negative stereotypes, well, that's what the phrase "shonda fur di goyim" is for. But, hell, he'd deserve a cherem even if this happened entirely within the Jewish community.

So: how do we go about contacting his community and issuing a cherem? I doubt HE'D care much -- I doubt he goes to shul. But I think it would send an important message to the world: this isn't who we are.

Today was my Dad's bar mitzvah. As many of you know, my Dad is a ger, and converted in 1998 or so. The trigger was that he realized that he wanted to have an aliyah at my aufruf before my wedding. So he converted, and he and Mom had a Jewish wedding.

But he never read from the Torah.

B'nai Or, the Jewish Renewal hippy Jewish community that my folks belong to, and my mother is a longtime lay leader for, did an adult b'nai mitzvah class this past year. And Dad, and five other people, signed up for it, and read from the Torah today.

It was wonderful.
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As I am many years, I'm struck by how little the Channukah story really has to do with the historical events on which it's ostensibly based.

And I taught my class, again this year, the story of Channukah. Which is a different thing than the story told in the Books of Maccabees I and II, which is why those books aren't in the Jewish scriptures, and is a very different thing that the historical events which actually happened.

And of those three things -- the historical truth, the Biblical record, and the folktale passed down from generation to generation -- I decided, and rightly so, that the important one to teach was the folktale.

Because that's the one with the lessons that I want them to learn. And I'm quite willing to tell them that this is the folktale, not the historical events. And that, in this case, the folktale is more important than the history, at least for them, at least right now.

Why is it that you can go for years without particularly having much to do, and then, all of a sudden, you're overwhelmed?

Earlier this week, my father's cousin Ann died. She was 38, and his goddaughter. She left a fifteen-year old son. She'd had substance abuse problems for most of her life, and died suddenly. Didn't seem to be actually directly related to any substance abuse, except in that it had probably left her in more fragile health long-term.

The wake was Friday, the funeral this morning.

This morning, Mom and Dad's friend Mark Rosen died. It wasn't a surprise -- he'd had pancreatic cancer for years, and had been in a coma for days. Although, he'd dragged himself out of the hospital on Rosh Hashana in order to lead part of services. There comes a point where, hell, you're dying, so there's no reason NOT to leave the hospital in order to go to services -- it's not going to significantly affect your lifespan one way or the other, so long as it doesn't increase your discomfort.

And most of Mom's family was coming over to Mom and Dad's house for Sukkot, between two and three today.

And I had to be at work at four.
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It's raining. Really hard. I just started building my sukkah.

Some things I learned:
1. It is possible to fit 8 2"x3"x8' studs and 12 1/2"x2"x8' pieces of strapping into a Toyota Camry.
2. But it's not actually EASY to do so.
3. Rain is wet.
4. Another pair of hands might help. . .

Anyone wanna come over and help me build my sukkah?

So, this is the period of the Ten Days of Repentance, when Jews try to look at all their relationships, with friends, family, with G-d, and with themselves, and see what they can do to patch them up. Before Yom Kippur. Which starts tomorrow night. So I'm kind of leaving this until the last minute. . .

(Okay, there's actually quite a bit of wiggle room later in the next couple weeks, so this isn't REALLY the last minute. It's just the last minute before you have to file for an extension. . . )

If I have done something that hurt you, leave a comment here, or email me, and let me know what it is, so we can talk about how I can make it up to you, make amends, and make things right.

I know I've got one relationship which is in a really weird holding pattern, and has been for over a year. And that one, unfortunately, isn't going to be all nicely resolved by tomorrow night. That's one which I will be attempting to work with, though.

Other than that one, though, I can't think of any off the top of my head. Which is why, if YOU know of something I've done, or not done, that needs to be resolved, I ask that you let me know. I don't promise that I will fix it. But I will try.

So, last night, I cut out of the Lefton's End-of-Summer party for like an hour or two to go home and do class prep for this morning. Then I went back to the party and stayed until about midnight. I was in bed by quarter to one or so, and woke up at seven-thirty or so, which has been a reasonable amount of sleep for me recently.

I got to Hebrew school around 8:45 -- class starts at 9:30. And I found that my classroom had been used for childcare during Rosh Hashana services. Which is fine. And that the room hadn't been put back together again afterwards. Which is not fine. I mean, it wasn't a mess or anything -- but my table was gone, my whiteboard markers were gone (and they're MY freakin' markers -- they don't belong to the school), my sign on the wall which says "Kitah Gimmel" and all the kids' names in English and Hebrew was gone, there were piles of toys and games in the corner -- I know my class: toys and games in the corner of the room is a BAD thing to have -- my papers and stuff were all stacked on a shelf in the corner.

I went and did some photocopying of worksheets I'd make up, and came back downstairs, by which time all the other teachers had shown up. It was a Gan day -- the kindergarten class only meets every other week, and only for an hour -- so Tamara, who is the Gan teacher besides being the Gimmel co-teacher, would only be available for the first hour.

That's when Rafi got the phone call that Isaac, the Kitah Bet teacher, was in the hospital with a fever.
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