What to do about baseball?

Tags

children, halacha, rules, Shabbat

My son has fallen in love with baseball. He played on a team for the first time this fall. He loved it so much that he decided not to play soccer but to do fall baseball. Baseball sounded good because it was local and soccer required traveling up to 2 hours away.

This baseball idea is all fine but they do not give a schedule ahead of time. There is no way of knowing when the games will be. So guess when they are playing. Yep, 9 AM on Saturday.

Here is my dilema. We are not halachic Jews and we do not follow the word of our rabbi. However, we do observe Shabbat starting on Friday night through Saturday night. They way we approach Shabbat is that we do not do anything related to our work during the week. Shabbat is for rest and renewal. That means we focus on family, reading, playing outside, inviting friends over and enjoying the aspects of life we do not get to do while working during the week. The things that we consider part of the work week are the TV, computer, electronic games, and shopping.

What do we do with baseball? Is baseball OK? If baseball is what is not? Is the issue Shabbat or that my Saturday schedule is being changed?

If I am raising Jewish children with the love and passion of Judaism how do I teach the importance of Shabbat? Is it by telling them what they cannot do? I hope not. But at some point I will have to say no. What is my line? Where am I comfortable?

• Going to a friends house – well yes if they are playing outside
• Going to the mall - well here seems to be the line
• Going to the movies - this seems to step over it
• Going to a friends to play video games – no
• Going to grandparents where they watch TV – yes, it’s their grandparents
• Going out to a party on Friday night – is one night different then everynight?

 My children are still young so this is on the edge of theoretical, however the baseball thing is real. I do not think I have a problem with baseball but I am still wrestling with it.

What do you do? Are you a halachic Jew? Does having a rule book simplify things? Are you practicing Jew? How do you do Shabbat with your children? What would you do in this case?

cross-posted on Blog Midrash

Aches

Tags

aches, attention

These aren’t so Jewish but they make me wonder.

For the past couple of years my joints have become stiffer. It takes about 5 mins every morning to get moving where I can step on my ankles and knees. I sit on the side of my bed and rotate them and crack them. Then I slowly get up and hobble a long.

My lower back aches in the middle of the night and I wake to crack it by leaning forward and stretching a bit. My fingers creak after half a days work on the computer. My neck gets kinks after long days.

All of these just seemed like growing old. Last week I went to visit the doctor. They took my blood for Lyme disease, Lupis, Rheumatoid arthritis and general inflamation. All the tests came back negative. There is nothing wrong with me from that perspective.

So why is it that after the doctor’s visit that everything just seems to ache a little more?

If I ache now, what am I going to be like in my 40s or 50s?

If it gets worse how will I keep working?

It really does seem like the doctor visit made it worse … now I am thinking about it.

Jewish Journey: Bar Mitzvah

Tags

Bar Mitzvah, drash, Torah, trope

Do you have to do a Bar Mitzvah when you convert? Why are you doing it now? That must have been a lot of work? Where did you find the time? Why did you decide to do it?

The rabbi asked my wife and she said that I would be interested. He asked me to join the class and how could I say no?

What does a Bar Mitzvah mean when you are 39? For me there were several things:

• I had never had a Bar Mitzvah
• I had never had the honor of reading from the Torah
• I had never learned how to chant Trope
• I had the opportunity to study with 7 other adults who came at this from all different directions
• I had the opportunity to learn more

13 years being Jewish, it seemed so right to start studying for a Bar Mitzvah. I would be able to relearn the Hebrew aleph-bet so that I could read. I would learn the trope so that I could chant.

Learning trope was a challenge. I never thought about this much until the class. I have never heard myself sing. I never sing out loud. I have never learned a tune. I cannot even reproduce a tune to a song that I have heard for 20 years. It isn’t that I am tone deaf it is more that I have no musical memory. So how do you learn how to chant if you cannot remember the tune 5 minutes later. It was work. I first transcribed the notes as dots over each letter in the word. That told me where to go up and down. But I lost all of the cadence and emphasis. So I made some dots darker and bigger for emphasis. Now I could go up and down with emphsis. Yay.

The only problem is how do you take a two syllable word and go up and down seven times.  So I had to draw the word out in latin characters so that something like b’shayla became b’shay la hahaha ha haah. Now I can see the direction, the emphasis and the syllable stretch. That is what I memorized; Hebrew marked with vowels, trope, dots, and transliterations. A Russian friend who lived in Israel for 7 years could not read a thing.

While I was practicing and listening to my portion over and over I also started on my Drash. I wrote several things here and finally posted my ultimate version. My first draft I sent to the rabbi and he gave me some good advice.  Some advice on looking for ways to bring all the ideas together. I worked hard. I sweated and got annoyed. It was all the type of writing that I have hated for years. But I finished and I think that it was better than my first draft.  Naso: Reflections of a Nazarite

The day came and I was ready. I did not feel worried or anxious about anything. The women were all worried about crying or freezing because they did not like presenting infront of people. Me, I did not mind at all. I had sent out little Jewish quotes and Omer meditations for the group to work on before the “big” day. I was not worried.

There were 7 of us called to the Torah. I was number 6. The sun was beating down on me in my suit and tallit. I was hot but enjoying everyones’ drashot. My turn came and I was ready. I had my yad in pocket and most of my drash handwritten (the wrong one was in the siddur). One of my fellow Bat Mitzvah leaned over and asked if I wrote in Hebrew or English (such great handwriting).

I walked over to the center of the bimah and started reading my d’rash. About two lines in I lost it. I was about to cry and I had no idea how to recover so I paused. Not that pausing helped do anything but focus me on the fact that I was about to cry. I was thinking “how in the world was I going to regroup and finish this?” I leaned over and looked at my family and friends, smiled and said “this was not supposed to happen.” That got a laught and broke the tension. I finished my d’rash and then had adrenaline floating my eyeballs and deafening my ears. Such a fantastic way to start chanting.

I started. “Velakach ha’cohen et hazroah b’shelah …” I prayed and made it beautiful. When I finished I kissed my tallit that touched the Torah and turned to the cantor and said “I did it.”

I chanted Torah the first time – hopefully there will be many more.

cross posted on Blog Midrash