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Dip the apple in the honey / Make a bracha loud and clear / L'shana tova tikaseivu / Have a happy, sweet new year! |
Friday, September 10, 1999 Running Off for Rosh HaShana I have to head back to Far Rockaway really soon, so I'd better make this one fast. I'm going back for Rosh HaShana, you see, which is tomorrow and Sunday... which also means that the earliest possible time for the next update will be late Sunday night, and, frankly, it's more likely that it'll have to wait until Monday.
The good news is that the History professor whose course I want to take called The Professor Whose Book-- no, that appellation's outdated now. Anyway, she called the professor who'd been helping me with this and said there'd be no problem if I want to take her course. So I'll be stopping by her office before class on Monday, and going to the class in question thereafter. Not much else of import happened on Thursday, except that I went to the library and rented Dead Poets Society, which I hadn't seen before. The catch is that I read the book years ago. The film wasn't bad, but the book was much better.
The situation with my watch is getting ridiculous. It conked out again yesterday due to sweat acculating under it, and I hadn't been running or anything this time around. Just normal activity. I know I selected the cheapest watch I could find, but this is just absurd. I'm starting to consider putting some sort of absorbant pad between my wrist and the watch. A folded-up tissue perhaps. Hmmm... maybe there's a market here.
Get new Stay-Free Ultra Mini Pads! For those light days when you still want your watch to work!Or, umm, maybe not. Especially since anybody who could afford to pay for such a product regularly wouldn't be buying a $5 watch in the first place.
As of earlier this week, my mother's out of the hospital and in a rehab center in New Jersey. I'd like to visit her next week, but I'll have to figure out how to accomplish that, if it's feasible in the first place. We'll see, I guess. At any rate, I understand that they're working her pretty hard, and that she's improving. And I'm sketchy on the details, as I'm only getting the occasional scrap of information at this point.
Rosh HaShana has a few functions. It marks the start of the Jewish year, and the start of the Ten Days of Repentance. It is the day when, in Jewish tradition, God makes the preliminary judgements on everybody in the world, weighing their good deeds and sins, and determining what will happen to them in the year to come. First and foremost, however, it is devoted to the theme of God's kingship over the world. The two-day holiday is marked by hours of prayer, and the sounding of the shofar, or ram's horn. It's also marked by a number of other customs, including the eating of a slice of apple dipped in honey, to symbolize one's wish for a "sweet year." Similarly, one's challah is also dipped in honey, rather than the usual salt. Personally, I detest honey, as I find it to be too cloying. I have thus raised the practice of applying only a microscopic drop of honey to my apple slice to an art. It occurs to me that this may be true on more than one level.
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