Livre d'Or

Content note: mentions antisemitic murders and police violence. I personally am completely safe, I'm only talking about dealing with news.

It's around midday Yom Kippur. I'm leading the morning service with a tiny community in the southwest corner of England. There's a slight hiatus as this congregation only have two Torah scrolls, so we have to roll through from the first reading in Exodus to the second reading in Leviticus, saving the second scroll for the afternoon reading from Deuteronomy. (In this community, like most of the Progressive world, our second reading is Leviticus 19, not the verses that are sometimes used as clobber texts to support homophobia.) While there's milling about, the volunteers running the tech for Zoom approach me at the bimah and let me know that there has been an attack in a synagogue in Manchester.

First, why did we even know about this, when it's the Sabbath of Sabbaths and people aren't using their phones? Because we're running Zoom from a laptop under Windows, and Windows likes to pop up breaking news tickers. At least it was only the laptop, we didn't have the Zoom participants projected onto a big screen like many shuls do. But the Zoom techs know, and now everyone knows, that an Orthodox synagogue in North Manchester was attacked during their Yom Kippur service and two people were killed.

The next thing is that most people do in fact turn their phones back on to find out more. Not just from morbid curiosity, but to find out if people they know are safe. Almost everybody has Manchester connections, myself included. And also because we suddenly remember we've been told by theCSTthat for safety, at least someone in each community should be reachable by phone, even though it's the Sabbath of Sabbaths and we shouldn't be using tech. (This advice is given to, and mostly followed by, Orthodox communities as well, where they often take the prohibition very seriously.) Messages of sympathy and checking in if we're ok come pouring in. The CST remind us not to gather near the entrance of the synagogue, but to disperse immediately when we leave, and reassure us that the police are on standby. I don't know whether people get distracted and start scrolling other stuff on their phones, probably they do, but I can hardly blame them, Even if they're very disciplined about only checking their people are safe and not opening any other part of the pocket Skinner box, they're in a very different headspace from when we were fully focused on some combination of praying and daydreaming or internal reflection.

By Musaf, the additional service that follows the morning service, and is considered the deepest point of the holiest day, we know a little more. The name of the synagogue, that there was a car ramming attack and the knife-wielding attacker killed two people. The rabbi and congregation barricaded the doors, following a protocol that we all drill and rehearse regularly, and the attacker was "only" able to harm people who happened to be outside at the time, late comers, people who had gone out for a break and some fresh air, the security volunteers. That the police had arrived within minutes and shot the attacker dead.

I'm a student less than halfway through my training, but I'm the only authority this congregation have. I carry on with Musaf, (we later learn that even the synagogue directly attacked did in fact go back to their service once the immediate emergency had been dealt with) but the timbre is very different from what I had planned. I read the prayer-poemUnetaneh Tokefwhich contains a section about people who die by violence without completing their natural span. We've just updated to a new prayerbook; the old one presented a lot of Shoah-related material in the context of remembering Jewish martyrs, which has been included in Musaf since Mediaeval times, with descriptions of famous martyrs killed by the Romans as a stand-in for victims of Crusader and other anti-Jewish violence. The new one still has this section, but attempts to shift the focus to ways to sanctify God's name through living holy lives as well as through martyrdom. That really did not go to plan. We're right back into, everybody hates Jews and wants us dead.Act, we pray,for the sake of those killed for your holy name.

Yizkor, the memorial service, is a mess. Partly because I didn't manage to get through it without crying, the first Yizkor when I have to mention my mother. Partly because on top of everything else the community had also just heard the news of the sudden death the previous day of a beloved trans elder, they knew she was sick but didn't know she was terminal, and it was faster than even the pessimistic prognosis she'd been given. I explain that we don't usually include people in Yizkor who haven't yet been buried, but obviously we're thinking about this person, and the two killed in Manchester that morning, though we didn't yet know their names. May God remember our pioneers and community builders. May God remember our martyrs.

All this was Thursday. Since then we know somewhat more details about what actually happened. Though people didn't wait until official statements had been released to speculate about the killer's identity and his motives. Some were sure he was a far right extremist, others a pro-Palestinian activist. The claims that he was a trans antifa marxist nazi immigrant are obvious American culture war nonsense and hopefully nobody in the UK takes that sort of crap seriously. What do we actually know? That he's a British man of Syrian origin, with the first name 'Jihad', that scary religious concept that lots of Islamophobes are already paranoid about. That one of the dead and one of the seriously injured Jewish people were in fact shot by the police; the original killer didn't have a gun. We may never know his views on Palestine though lots of people are perfectly convinced they can guess.

All those people, in my community and elsewhere, who were feeling relieved and reassured that the police showed up so promptly, and grateful that armed police attended many synagogues around the country, when in fact the police are responsible for two shootings, I don't know. I was ready to concede that much as I hate the whole CST security stuff, the constant clamour for increased policing of synagogues and Jewish spaces, maybe in this case they did actually prevent a horrible attack from being even worse. And that could still be true: if the police hadn't been so quick to shoot innocent bystanders, maybe the attacker would have managed to get in to the synagogue building and stab more people. I went to my home synagogue this Shabbat, purely as a congregant, and there were armed police patrolling outside; they didn't make me feel protected and secure, but they did have that effect for other people. Several of my fellow students, like me leading Yom Kippur solo in small communities, didn't hear about the attack from a stupid Windows ticker, but because the police entered their synagogues and informed them what was going on. Some felt reassured when the police showed up, others, particularly those who have been mistreated by racist and bigoted police in the past, felt scared, for most it's probably a mixture of both.

We also now know the name of the rabbi of the congregation attacked; I've met him, he is the one Orthodox rabbi who showed up to lead the funeral of a child whose family situation wasn't completely regular according to Orthodox standards. A funeral I spent some time thinking might be my responsibility. And the partner of one of the student rabbis had kids praying in that area, not at the specific synagogue attacked but within a few streets of it, kids who are themselves observant Orthodox Jews and don't carry or use their phones on Yom Kippur, so they didn't know they were safe until nightfall. And non-Jewish friends who live in the area and have good reason to be very scared and disturbed about the sudden influx of police everywhere. We're one degree of separation away at most. It could have been any one of us. Probably, probably, violent fanatics are more likely to attack visible Orthodox synagogues in heavily Jewish areas than tiny Progressive congregations that meet in some hired hall in a remote town. That's not much to hold on to.

As for the media and political response, what can I say? I'm not at all impressed with the attack being used as an excuse to crack down even further on democratic, peaceful protests. Even Jewish organizations are joining in with the calls to ban the protests about Palestine Action, or even to charge the demonstrators with hate crimes. The Palestine Action protests are not even specifically pro-Palestine though probably most of the participants do care about the suffering of people in Gaza, but the main aim is protesting the very heavy-handed designation of Palestine Action as a "terrorist" organization, authorizing the arrests of anyone who so much as states "I support Palestine Action" or possibly even "I am against genocide in Gaza", since that could be said to be agreeing with Palestine Action's aims. This draconian policing doesn't make Jews safer, it undermines free speech. And there is absolutely no credible evidence that pro-Palestine demonstrations and campaigns had anything to do with the attack on the synagogue on Thursday.

Also some dickhead has firebombed a mosque since then, thankfully there was no loss of life but it's still very upsetting. It could be some kind of twisted "retaliation" for the attack on Thursday, or it could just be random violence. I am also angry with the pro-Palestine activists who are blaming Jews for everything. No, a bunch of English Jews did not deserve to be stabbed during Yom Kippur (or on any other day) because they might possibly be "Zionist" in the sense that they may or may not give money to Israeli charities or may have visited Israel or feel a cultural connection to the country. This is not resistance or intifada or in any way helpful to the people suffering in Gaza and elsewhere in the middle east. It is perfectly reasonable that most UK Jews are upset and scared about this attack that we are quite closely connected to, that doesn't mean we're callous about, let alone responsible for, whatabout the dozens of people killed in Gaza by the Israeli military on the same day. No, it's not the fault of some sinister Jewish conspiracy to prevent people accessing medical care that Manchester hospitals were put on lockdown on Thursday; that was the police response to a violent attack and you can blame the murderer or the police or both but it's nothing to do with "Jewish supremacist Zionists".

I am scared of continued or copycat violence against Jews. I am probably more scared of backlash against Muslims / Arabs / brown people / immigrants in general, especially knowing the attacker had an Arab name. And I am more scared of this incident being used to undermine democracy, protest, free speech and criticism of the establishment, and secondarily of Jews being blamed for that response. I am worried about how the Jewish community in general may react out of the fear engendered by this attack. Also, I am deeply grateful for the kind people who checked in with me personally when they heard the news, and for all the leaders, Muslim, Christian and civic, who sent messages of support to the Jewish community and continue to be in solidarity with us.

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One advantage of my unexpected free month was that I started reading books again. Not a lot but 6 complete novels and a longfic in 6 weeks, which is more than I have for years. Let me catch up with some brief reviews:

Since term properly, properly finished on 6 July, I have read:



I enjoyed but didn't love Miller'sThe Song of Achilles; I foundCirceto be strong in the same ways but much more exciting. It really hits the notes remarkably well of both a myth, about gods and monsters and heroes and epic scale, and a novel about a person who seems entirely real.Circereally wrestles head-on with the situation of a woman who is powerful and privileged and certainly capable of using her power for harm, but is still subject to the cruelty of men who can physically overpower her and have the backing of the whole of male-dominated society.

As such it is often really hard to read; I don't mind feminist takes on classical mythology that make the women the viewpoint characters, but Miller's Circe is something far more raw than that, it's a kind of extended wail of anger about how all of Western society mistreats women. It's also really gripping even when you kind of know the plot (because it's in the Odyssey and other foundational texts of said Western society.) It isn't about relentless grinding violence, either; the ending, with Circe's friendship with Penelope is really sweet, and there are plenty of other moments of happiness and success. Circe comes out a winner in a way that makes sense to her, even if she doesn't overturn all the terrible power structures she (and the other characters) are caught in. Definitely recommended if you're feeling strong.

Coconut Unlimitedwas a present from my brother Thuggish Poet an embarrassingly long time ago – he thought I might relate to the experience of being a minority in a private school. However, CU is so firmly a book about a boy in a boys' school that there was almost no point of connection! Shukla pulls off a pretty unusual feat, which is writing from the point of view of a teenage boy who doesn't really see girls / women as people, but without either glorifying gross teenage boy attitudes or inviting the reader to feel superior to the protagonist. Part of how he does this is framing the story as reminiscence, with three established and secure adults looking back on their teenage years. Honestly it's one of the best coming-of-age stories I've come across in a while. Amit and his friends do absolutely stupid things for reasons that totally make sense within their limited, teenage worldview, and they could be incredibly cringey, but Shukla keeps them sympathetic.

Another reason why I was very unlike Amit and his friends is race. I might have been almost the only Jewish kid in school but I'm white. And overt antisemitism in the 90s was much less socially acceptable than anti-Asian racism (though it did exist, and I think my brothers in an all-male environment like the one in the book suffered more of it than I did in a girls' school). Also, my parents are not first gen immigrants, so I didn't have any of the issues around having on some level "better" language and cultural knowledge than them. I was also never tempted by or anxious about having street cred or whether people saw me as white or not, the titular "coconut" thing just wasn't an issue for me. It was always obvious that Black American youth culture was not for me, but that's not because I was more enlightened than Amit, just plainly more white.

Basically I was hugely invested in the three friends and their journey to figuring out a way to be themselves, navigating their various cultures' expectations of them.

I asked

• Circeby Madeline Miller 2018, Pub 2018 Bloomsbury, ISBN 9781526612519
  
• Coconut Unlimitedby Nikesh Shukla (c) Nikesh Shukla 2010, Pub 2010 Quartet, ISBN 978-0-7043-7204-7
  
• Will Super Villains be on the final?by Naomi Novik, illustrated by Yishan Li (c) Temeraire LLC 2011, Pub 2011 Del Rey, ISBN 978-0-345-51656-5
  
• Some desperate gloryby Emily Tesh (c) Emily Tesh 2023, Pub 2023 Orbit, ISBN 978-0-356-51718-6
  
• Ancillary Mercyby Ann Leckie (c) Ann Leckie 2015, Pub 2015 Orbit, ISBN 978-0-356-50242-7
  
• A free man of colorby Barbara Hambly (c) Barbara Hambly 1997, Pub 1998 Bantam, ISBN 0-553-57526-0
  
• I transmigrated into Cordelia Naismith!by Lanna Michaels, 2025

jackfor recs, and he offeredWill Super Villains be on the final?, and I said, no, I need more words. I decided to try this graphic novel about a superhero academy, by an author whose prose I like, and it turned out I was right, graphic novels just don't have enough words for me. Possibly if I'd read the whole series at one go rather than just the first volume, I might have felt less unsatisfied? But I just didn't like it enough to want to seek out the rest.

It's fine. It takes a fairly clichéd story of a teen girl with extra-special amazing powers who for flimsy narrative reasons isn't accepted at her new school, but then saves the day. Not a bad example of that genre, Li's drawings and Novik's writing are definitely competent, I could tell the characters apart, the story is pacey. It's manga-style both in terms of the art and the book as a physical object that is somewhere between a periodical and a book, cheap paper, line drawings only, and I haven't read a lot of manga. The story fit very comfortably into standard western school story / superhero comic grooves. For me the most interesting part was the endnotes about how Novik and Li worked together to create the characters, but that's a lot to do with the fact that it was a few pages of whole paragraphs.

Everybody lovesSome desperate glory, all my friends think it's awesome and it's swept all the awards. Now I've got round to reading SDG, I entirely concur, it really is that good. I massively loved it. It has great characterization, and great world-building and it's an exciting space adventure that also cares about the ethics of ~conquering new worlds~. And it does a really interesting job of tackling the narrative problem of characters going back in time to fix bad history. My only slight criticism is that I could see the first twist coming, but not at all the second one or any of the twists after that, it kept on pulling the rug from under my feet even when I was primed to expect it to have sudden reveals. It pulls off well something which is far too often done badly: what if a fascist was sympathetic and not just a monster? And it's just impeccable writing throughout.

I think I didAncillary Mercya disservice by reading it absolutely years afterAncillary Sword, and immediately afterSome Desperate Glory. Leckie is good in much the same way Tesh is, incredibly original space opera with great characterization and nuanced ethical questions about (space) empires. The too long since I read AS and AJ problem was mitigated by the fact that Breq tends to infodump a lot about her experience of being a human who used to be a spaceship, and the complex political situation she's dealing with, so she kind of filled in the bits that I'd forgotten.

I particularly enjoyed how AM works with Lieutenant Tisarwat as a Mary Sue character, with plot-relevant violet eyes and precocious talents, and completely subverts that trope. And generally I really cared about every character, even the small side-plot ones. The ending felt satisfying in some ways, it sort of wraps up all the problems identified in AJ (and expanded in AS), the all-powerful aliens, the use of clones, and Anaander Mianaai herself. Maybe a bit too neat? But I'm partly disappointed because I didn't want everything to be resolved, I wanted to read more of Breq and her crew desperately battling and scheming to save the galaxy from imminent doom. But I think there's two more novels in the same 'verse, even if we're not getting more of one of the best SF heroes this century.

I was very interested in this classic detective novel in the really unusual setting of 19thcentury New Orleans. And in fact it really worked well for me as a detective novel and as a showcase for Hambly's in-depth period research. Sort of like the Heyer detective novels, except that a book set in the US pre-Emancipation with a Black main character is deeply about racism rather than glossing over racism. I couldn't guess whodunnit but then I never really can; aFMoC didn't feel like a puzzle novel anyway, I was very interested in getting to know the characters and their backgrounds and motivations, not really solving the murder. There is a certain amount of violence but it's not especially gory by the standards of detective novels, and thankfully it neither minimizes racism nor presents the suffering of enslaved people voyeuristically.

I was intrigued to see what sort of author would write a detective like Benjamin January, and learned to my slight suprise that Hambly is a white woman deeply embedded in SF fandom, well enough connected to have relied onOctavia Butler(!!!) as a sensitivity reader. I was interested in, and educated by, Hambly's author's note about the fine social distinctions between people with different Black ancestry in the period. What I appreciated most about aFMoC was that the stakes are genuinely high; obviously it's bad if someone gets away with murder in any context, but in this novel January is in real danger of being re-enslaved. Unlike Tesh, Hambly is of a generation who warn for historic racism, but not for rape and child abuse, and there's rather a lot of the latter, though it's off screen.

I don't know that I'll rush out to read all the rest of the Benjamin January novels, but I'm glad I did try this classic introduction of the character.

I utterly lovedI transmigrated into Cordelia Naismith!It's a perfect, delightful exploration of the fantasy shared by many geeky women of a certain age of being Cordelia from Lois McMaster Bujold'sShards of Honor.

lannamichaelsalways writes really strong Vorkosiverse fic, and very much captures both what is great about Bujold (including her voice, super impressive), and also her problems. And I just rolled around in ITiCN! It really does feel like getting a bit more of Bujold's early in the series writing, and the glimpses of the OC who gets to be Cordelia are glorious. And also it gives very justified criticism of all that's wrong with the books (slight spoilers for the remainder of the series), but in a subtle, not heavy-handed way. I stayed up til 3 am reading to the end (which I am usually pretty disciplined about avoiding) and I really wanted to spend more time with not!Cordelia.

It's rated G on AO3, which I'm sure is correct by Archive standards, but I would kind of hesitate to give it to an actual 12yo. There is some sexual detail, not very explicit but more than just fade-to-black, and it has about the same level of triggery stuff as the original: the plot depends on rape and torture and murder and and war and partner abuse, but these things are mostly in the background.

I don't know how well this would work if you don't know canon; Ithinkyou would probably get something out of a very solid 30K word isekai space opera but it does kind of assume familiarity with the source material. But if you are at all a fan ofShards of Honoryou should definitely read the fic!

Up next:The Summer Bookby Tove Jansson.

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This weekend one of my oldest friends got married, and my partners celebrated their 20thanniversary with a Jewish blessing and wedding canopy. So I had a lovely lovely time, and also I'm very much reminded that there's a crowd of (mostly somewhat connected) people I've been friends with for most of 30 years and I should make more active effort to actually spend time with them because they are awesome.

Sometimes lifecycle events mean learning something new about people you've known for decades. In

doseybat's case, it was that they have a brother-in-law who owns a decommissioned lightship on the Thames which he lets out as a recording studio. I learned this because it was the extremely original venue for the wedding!

The lightship was covered in Pride flag bunting, and beautifully crafted origami bats, dragons and paper cabbages, made by

blue_maiwhom I've known since we were 10. The attendees were all visibly alternative sort of people in ways that have continuity with how we were in the 90s and 2000s. In fact I knew almost all the guests well enough to be excited to catch up with old friends; there were a few relatives of

verazea's whom I don't really know, and the residents of the lightship, and one extremely lovely new person, a New Zealander whom I clicked with instantly (and I presume unlike everybody else isNODW). But mostly, the very people who kept me sane and connected through university and moving away for my science career. And whom I haven't seen nearly enough of partly because we're all in our mid-40s and busy, but mainly because of the accursed 5 year pandemic.

So I caught up over coffee with some of the early birds, and then we went onto the ship (by means of jumping over a slightly alarming gap between the jetty and the gangplank), and played middle-sized jenga (not fully giant, but also bigger than a standard set) made of pieces wombled and then painted in shiny jewel colours by

squirmelia. It turns out that playing jenga with painted pieces, balanced on a not entirely flat capstan, on a ship in windy conditions is a little challenging, and it made a terrifying clatter when someone lost. Then we ate tasty tasty Chinese food (carefully labelled as 'vegetarian' or 'contains prawns' which seemed to cover most people's dietary requirements). And got trapped by a strategically laid out Millennium Falcon jigsaw. And bounced at

pfyand

hairyearsand other old friends and exchanged life stories with the one new-to-me person.

We painted chairs with botanical and other doodles and messages of love and congratulations, and in the course of the evening

doseybatand

verazeasat down in them and were married by

ewt. She and I were geeking out a bit about being officiants at weddings; Bat and Sarah had asked for a non-religious wedding, and I was interested to note that in some ways it's easier to do a non-religious but Christian flavoured wedding than a Jewish equivalent. Because all the wording of the Christian ceremony is so culturally embedded, like "Do you, X, take Y to be your lawful wedded spouse?" and "For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health". I haven't yet been asked to do a non-theistic Jewish wedding, but I have thought about how such a thing might work. At some point during the ceremony the tide rose and lifted the ship, which was delightful.

I'm not in a good position to judge because I'm the least introvert person ever, but it seemed like it was as introvert-friendly as a wedding party could be. There was plenty of space for quiet, one-to-one conversation and very little enforced jollity. Also most of the ship is, obviously, outdoors and most people were prepared to wear masks while below decks. Part of the reason why I haven't seen lots of these people very frequently lately is that they're generally the most Covid-cautious section of my friendship group, and when we don't have the easy default of, let's all go to the pub at [time], or let's all pile into someone's living room and chat and eat snacks, it's just that much harder to arrange anything. I miss low-key house parties and meet-ups. But I have renewed my determination to invite specific people to do specific social things; one-on-one you can of course set what level of Covid precautions you can agree on.

Sunday was a boiling hot day, less ideal than the cool, breezy weather that graced

doseybatand

verazea's wedding. We turned up at the synagogue in our pretty clothes and unloaded all the amazing (entirely gluten-free!) food that

ghoti_mhic_uaithad acquired and prepared. We realized belated we hadn't quite planned around dealing with door security (for regular services there's a volunteer rota), but we managed to let people in without anyone needing to miss out too much. It turned out that

ghoti_mhic_uaithad never been to a Jewish wedding before, and not even set eyes on a chuppah before standing under one, which seems like a bit of a failure on my part as a student rabbi partner, but it was all ok.

I was impressed by how many people showed up for the pre-wedding study session which was my contribution to the occasion. I taught the book of Tobit, focusing on the marriage-relevant bits. That was really an interesting exercise with a mixed audience of mostly Christians with no experience of Jewish-style text study, and Jews who have never heard of Tobit and don't know the plot, since it isn't in our Bible. Fortunately I had to write an essay last term about how I might present Tobit at a wedding or blessing ceremony, so Rab school had definitely set me up well for that one. People seemed interested and asked good questions.

There's quite an overlap between

ghoti_mhic_uaitand

cjwatson's friendship group, and

doseybat's friendship group, mostly because lots of the core people were contemporaries at Cambridge. But I avoided the temptation to go around making connections between the people who came to the Sunday wedding with the people I'd been hanging out with the day before; I think the centre of the Venn diagram is probably

wildeabandon,

the_alchemistand

themidnightgirl. Also lots of Jewish community people as you'd expect, and some home ed people, some of whom brought children / teenagers soOSOs'weren't the only young people. Also my Dad and brother and his friend who finally made it over from France after total visa doom, which was awful but their being there at all was a silver lining because they'd otherwise have been away this week.

FK led the ceremony, which she is brilliant at. We included bits from the first, Christian, wedding which are suitable for use in synagogue, such as a hymn which is a setting of Ps 148, and the couple renewing their vows (which isn't usually part of a Jewish wedding). The three younger kids and

fivemacksupported the chuppah (the eldest was supposed to be there too but was delayed due to traffic and missed the ceremony). Various friends and family read the 7 blessings, changing 'bride and groom' to 'man and wife'.

cjwatsonstamped on the glass, FK made a sexist joke and

ghoti_mhic_uaitheckled her, so that was all in order.

Then we ate the extremely tasty tea and drank prosecco and chatted to the guests and I was again reminded that I should make more effort to spend time with our generally awesome friends.

fivemackhad managed to conjure up a ceilidh band, and

themidnightgirlcalled the dancing with huge brilliance. There was a mix of experienced dancers and people who needed a fair amount of support, not to mention the two francophones who had never experienced British folk dancing at all before, so we all had fun trying to translate the instructions into English; they threw themselves into it with great gusto and did not have too obvious «ils sont fous, ces anglais» speech bubbles. Z even explained what on earth went on with the cultural appropriation drama over Cherkassia Kefula, which is sort of an English folkdance take on a Jewish origin dance based on the vine / mayim step, and I only just realized that the Kefula part is the Hebrew word for circle. And taught a bunch of recently created dances including one about the Dune sandworms (timely, as we'd just heard that Dune won the Long Dramatic Presentation Hugo), and one of her own.

It would have been an absolutely perfect occasion if we hadn't been very overheated. We had every window in the building fully open but it wasn't much cooler outside than inside. Not unrelatedly, takedown ended up taking ages and people were getting a bit frazzled by the end. But I think we did ok. Covid safety boiled down to pretty much relying on the open windows; it wouldn't really have been possible to eat with a mask on, and very challenging to dance, and I generally don't mask when I'm teaching. So I could have worn my mask for the ceremony but that was only like 20 minutes out of the whole afternoon so wouldn't have gained me much.

I sort of want to see if I can make it to my brother'scharity's ceilidhnext week. But Friday evening events in Brighton when I have a bar mitzvah in Cambridge on Saturday are a bit unworkable. And although I enjoyed the dancing, what I want more of isn't mainly dancing, it's spending time with people. And waiting for my friends to have reunions in the form of weddings isn't very efficient! I'm amazed that there were even two weddings this year, with most of my circle being in our 40s.

jackhas planned abank holiday picnicnext Monday; it will be fully outdoors, which is good for infection risk but possibly bad for enduring summer weather. But if you happen to be in Cambridge you're most welcome.

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This week P'tite Soeur organized a family trip to London. All four siblings and Dad, which is quite a feat of logistics even if we didn't manage to also include partners.

We met up late morning at theV&A. At first I couldn't find my sister because she'd texted me that she was in the sculpture gallery on the first floor but the sculpture gallery is on the ground and second floors, but I wandered through cool things while being lost. And we perused part of the photography gallery which is currently about the history of American photojournalism, focusing more on the Civil Rights and social history part than the landscape photography part, though the one Ansel Adams piece they did have on display stood out a mile. Then we found Screwy and Dad, and were immediately pounced on by a Saudi woman Screwy had met years ago, because he is the sort of person who spontaneously meets international friends in the doorway of museums. We had a not very satisfactory sandwich lunch in the garden café, and then headed to our main destination, theDesign and Disabilityexhibition. Which meant I got to say hi to theChihulythat lives in the main entrance (I'd come in from the tunnel from the Tube station so hadn't yet come that way.)

Theexhibitionitself was, I would say, ok but not a must-see. It was very worthy, lots of explaining the social model of disability and informing us that disabled people deserve to participate equally in society and need inclusion, not impractical high-tech gadgets. Little of that was new to me, though, and what I'd come for wasdesign, rather than things like histories of the kerb cut and Telethon protests or Camp Jened 'Crip Camp', or lectures about why ableism is bad. But all those things were interesting, and in true V&A fashion they had some outstandingtextilepieces. They also had a lot of adaptations to make the exhibition itself accessible to actually disabled visitors, but it felt a bit hollow because while showcasing best practice in this particular exhibition, they didn't in fact enhance the rest of the museum to the same standards. Indeed Dad, who is pretty fit for an octogenarian, found the museum as a whole tiring and lacking in places to sit and rest, which is exactly one of the problems that the prominently displayedFinnegan Shanonpiece highlighted.

We then walked along Hyde Park, past the Albert Memorial which we had great fun dissecting the colonialist themes of, in search of ice cream. I was very disappointed, they had no decent ice cream at all in the park, or even a tolerable cup of tea. But it was lovely to spend time with the family! That brought us quite nicely to our pre-show dinner venue, chosen by P'tite Soeur: the unpromisinginly named but actually awesomeTofu Vegan. Though we only booked an hour ahead, they were absolutely brilliant at accommodating Screwy's physical access needs and P'tite Soeur's dietary needs; she was geeking out with the waiter over how they made certain Chinese staples gluten free when core ingredients are wheat-based. The food was incredibly good, the service was brilliant, and we ended up paying £25 a head which is absurdly good for the middle of Kensington. Thuggish Poet joined up with us at the restaurant after a day at the cricket.

We then dispersed again because we had not quite managed to book seats together in the Albert Hall. But I waved at my siblings from all the way up in the cheap seats! Funnily enough that was my first ever prom and I loved it. We had pickedBerlioz' Symphonie Fantastiquemore or less at random (the date was convenient), and it was very good. Two short pieces before the interview, some fairly middle of the road but very well done Strauss, and a premiere of a super-weird contemporary piece rejoicing in the title ofZEBRA (or, 2-3-74: The Divine Invasion of Philip K. Dick), with an electric guitar solo. I might well have hated either of them, Strauss for being too obvious and the new thing for being too self-consciously Modern, but in fact they were just highly enjoyable. And the Symphony itself was completely delightful. Being the enormous cavern of the Albert Hall with a very large and very good orchestra and a top-of-the-range sound system definitely added to the experience, but it made me think I should go to more orchestral concerts. (Though it's not just me, it's super rude to applaud in the middle of a movement, right? Even at a dramatic ff climactic point?) Then I walked-ran to South Ken and managed to get on a train back to Cambridge exactly 40 minutes from the final baton.

Another thing I was able to do due to not being in Israel was to visit the community I'll be spending Yom Kippur with, the amazingKehillat Kernow, a peripatetic community covering most of the Cornwall peninsula. (Yes, that's me in the news article at the top of their website, they are very prompt at reporting!) The long train journey was not as wonderful as I had hoped, because the trains were very very overcrowded in peak season, but at least I had a seat and got to enjoy the lovely views. And read a bunch of novels, which is definitely making my brain happier.

They invited me to dinner Friday evening, and had a very Liv conversation about dealing with racism in education and medicine, with the other guests having direct professional expertise, not just setting the world to rights. And put me up in a super nice hotel in a neo-gothic pile that used to be a convent, and were gracious enough to invite me to stay Saturday night as well so I even got a little bit of time in Truro, which is where they held this particular service. I walked along the river a bit, I found a teeny-tiny Pride festival in the town centre, but it was packing up by the time I had finished dinner at 7 pm, so I wasn't able to get dessert from one of the sparkly rainbow doughnut stands.

In between I lead a Shabbat service, with very enthusiastic participation from the community, and they even appreciated my somewhat political sermon aboutwhether we can still be Zionists in this moment. Because it was the new moon of Av, I got to read from their super-excitingHistoric scroll. Well, actually I chanted the verses about the creation of the sun and moon; it's still a big deal for me to do that in public. I'm pretty pleased with how all that went.

And now I'm back and I have another month of relatively uncrowded schedule. It's very nice.

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It's been a full and emotional couple of months, friends. The main thing to report is that I was supposed to be in Israel as of a week ago, but Israel bombed Iran and Iran retaliated and the go/no-go date for my summer programme was right in the middle of the 11 days when Israel was in full lockdown due to lots of missile attacks, so they really had to cancel it. I have a whoooooole lot of emotions and thoughts about this, and I also have an unexpected summer month with almost no commitments.

We finished with the actual main part of term mid-May, but then as usual there were a couple of months of the academic year sort of weirdly trailing off. A week of extra classes because the college interpret regulations as meaning that we must have 12 taught sessions in each module come what may. Some bits of extra post term stuff that needed to happen, continuing community and placement work. End of semester assignments and exams, which were manageable because a whole bunch of academically challenging stuff got moved into the autumn term but still took up time. And just a lot of fairly intensive activities, some of them directly student-related, some of them starting to take on something more resembling rabbinic work.

I completed my three months of sabbatical cover for Mosaic Reform in North London; this meant I was actually there fairly regularly rather than just showing up, leading a service and vanishing again. Some people advised me that second year is too soon to take on that kind of ongoing work, but it was good for me, at this point I can do random Shabbat services at the drop of a hat and I'm not really learning anything from that. Mosaic exposed me to some amount of difficult community politics that I'm not going to go into on an unlocked post, and also wanted me to hold space for everybody struggling with how to react to news from Israel. So it was frustrating at times but valuable; these are very much the kinds of things I'll have to build skills in to be an effective rabbi. They also have a professional choir and I had fun working with the MD there.

In the middle there was a lovely long weekend in Norfolk with

jack, we didn't bother with the seaside this time but took a delightful little cottage in a village mainly notable for itsSteam museum. The steam exhibits were fun, particularly on a meta level, as there was a whole lot of information about how the owner, a businessman who made decent money (not a wild fortune or anything, just enough to fund his hobby) running a garden centre, and loved steam engines a lot but really didn't have a lot of practical knowledge about creating mini-railways or engine preservation generally. The curation is therefore rather eccentric; on the one hand they had a lot ofDad's Armymemorabilia as the recent film used some of their engines and created film sets there, but on the other they had a certain number of Nazi engines which were not exactly labelled as such, the plaques just gushed about the brilliance of the mechanism of engines "made in Germany for the war effort in 1941". I think it's on the whole good that nothing has overt Nazi insignia, but it was also disturbingly coy, especially alongside the wartime nostalgic "keep calm and carry on" aesthetic. Other than the steam museum we went on a few gentle countryside walks and ate lots of very good meals in country pubs.

I took part in a Tikkun Leyl Shavuot service hosted jointly by Oaks Lane Reform and the Liberal synagogue where I was on placement last year, ELELS and a smaller Reform synagogue in the same part of East London. They put me on lots of interfaith panels; they'd invited members of the three synagogues, plus some Christian clergy as guests, it wasn't a general interfaith event. It was very interesting to experience that kind of interfaith encounter in what was definitely a Jewish space. I've been to interfaith events physically within synagogue buildings before but we're almost always outnumbered by Christians. This time it was really clear that the small handful of clergy were guests at our event. Guests, not tourists. So we had a bring and share meal, with way too much food and lots of Jews being loud, then a typical Reform-style evening service which I think was quite a novel experience for most of the priests. Lots of singing, lots of participation from everybody, and a fairly mellow feel with lots of explicit emotional shaping. I gave the sermon and talked about my experiences growing up in the grouping of Essex and East London synagogues which overlapped with the three who were running this event, namedropping multiple historic rabbis and people present, while also choosing to be somewhat personal and vulnerable. Worked well.

The two panels they put me on were: the Ten Commandments; I did a lowkey rabbinic interpretation of 'honour your father and mother', while my Christian co-panellists either were a bit confused about what exactly counts as part of the Ten ('Love your neighbour' is important, but it's really not on topic for the panel), or tried to claim that 'you shall have no other gods but me' encompasses the rest, which led to questions from the floor about how a Christian can claim to keep that if they believe that Jesus is God, and poor Christians trying to explain the Trinity to a highly sceptical audience. Somebody commented to me that they shouldn't put priests on panels with rabbis because 'it just makes them look uneducated', which wasn't entirely fair, I did try to explain that it's more about a different approach to reading the Bible than lack of knowledge, but still.

And experiences of vocation and calling as religious leaders, I was really glad to be on that one. In part because I heard some quite heart-rending stories of Christian priests who had a strong sense of vocation from early childhood but were excluded for being gay and didn't return until much later in life, or who had been female and lifelong Catholics and deeply convinced that God had chosen them to be priests. Secondly because I wanted to convey the perspective that being a rabbi is a choice of career like any other, I don't believe that God loves clergy more than people with less glamorous jobs or disabled and unemployed people. Also I talked a bit about being poly and with non-Jewish as well as Jewish partners, which wove in well with the Christians' stories of being both outsiders and leaders. Another reason it was good I was included was because I was the only woman on the Jewish side, which is mainly coincidence, the female rabbi among the organizers just happened to be on leave that day, but four men and one woman looks a lot better than all male rabbis while the Christians had a good gender balance.

College sent some of us to a residential weekend for people from the Liberal movement who are being trained as lay service leaders. It's totally possible to just turn up and lead services, but the Liberals have a really nice training programme, really supportive and well thought out. It's a few days over 18 months, not a massive time-commitment, but very good for building core skills and most importantly confidence. And it turned out this course is full of people exactly like me. Not just that they've stepped up to lead services and often run tiny communities in the middle of nowhere where there are hardly any other Jews, but so many of them turned out to be similarly geeky and with interesting non-heteronormative family structures (even some poly folk) and homeschoolers and really quite a high proportion of people who are very open about being neurodivergent. It was most excellent networking because these are often communities too small to even hire student rabbis.

And then in mid-June the whole student body plus the principal all went to Germany for the very long-establishedThree faiths conference. That was an extremely weird experience in lots of ways, not least because our visit out there exactly coincided with the escalation of hostilities between Israel and Iran. The conference has had links with the college for literal decades, but we stopped regularly sending people because they had a historic problem with sexual aggression and weren't really handling it properly. And without us they have always struggled to attract Jews and indeed European Muslims, so despite significant effort it often defaults to being a crowd of generally liberal Christians and a couple of token minorities. To solve this problem they had in recent years started inviting an Israeli group, Jewish Israelis who are involved in peacebuilding, and ethnically Palestinian citizens of Israel (sometimes referred to as Israeli Arabs) who are are mostly Muslim with a significant Christian minority. However, most of this group didn't make it over this year because of the war. Some of them joined us over Zoom, including a Haifa professor with a very interesting background. When I say they joined us over Zoom I mean quite often participating from bomb shelters, or having to interrupt sessions due to a missile alert. And one young woman brought a cohort of 9 young people, Muslim Israelis of Palestinian heritage aged 11 to 15, on a terrifying odyssey across multiple countries during a war, in order to find any hope of a flight to Europe when airspace was closed. She wanted them to meet Jews who don't carry guns, these kids.

I had some great conversations and some very fraught conversations. It really did feel at times that the Christians were not exactly on the same planet as the Israelis, they were talking about how shocking it was for there to be violence affecting Europe after all those decades of peace since 1945 (sic) or explaining that if people would just trust each other and sit down and have an honest conversation there wouldn't be any conflict or war or killing. Many of them seemed like genuinely sincere, committed people, and it felt really good to be supporting and mentoring the younger Christian leaders who don't have the kind of collegial support trainee rabbis do over here. And the UK Jewish contingent were sort of between the two camps. Most of us have connections in Israel, often quite close connections, and are much more aware of what's happening there than our German Christian counterparts, but equally we were having a nice holiday in a nice safe part of Europe rather than a temporary respite from missile attacks and a lot of uncertainty about when we'd be able to get home. Because the college contingent all know each other and the small handful of other Jewish attendees, whereas the Christians were from disparate backgrounds and denominations, even though our numbers were about equal it did feel as if the Jewish group were much louder and more visible.

On top of everything else we were sleeping in dorms with very thin curtains, during a heatwave and with only about 4 hours of darkness a night. Between sleep deprivation and being adjacent to the war I was a total emotional wreck. I kind of fell apart when I got the news that my summer programme was cancelled. On the one hand I didn't want to go in the first place, and I had been carrying huge amounts of anxiety about what it would be like to have barely a couple of days at home before heading off to a foreign country for a month (even before I considered how likely it was that I'd encounter military or interpersonal violence there). At the same time, the situation being bad enough for both the Jerusalem Yeshiva who completely financially depend on their summer programme, and the college, to agree to cancel, was pretty scary. Frankly, the amount it was upsetting me just being on Zoom calls with Israelis, or simply having normal adult to teen conversations with the Palestinian kids, was a clear indicator that I was in no way emotionally ready to actually spend a month in Israel.

In fact, in hindsight it now looks like I could in fact have gone. The clash with Iran lasted 11 days, and when the US got involved I assumed it was the start of WW3 and there would be huge casualties, not just among the belligerents but worldwide, but actually it ended in a ceasefire which seems to be holding. And Israel is no more dangerous now than it was before June when everybody was telling me it was perfectly fine to travel there and I should stop being a baby about it. The rest of my cohort are either out there already or still planning to go (their trips were later in the summer than mine.)

After we got back from Germany I had a few days to recuperate, a couple of minor wrapping up the year meetings at college, a couple of community Shabbats, last time at Mosaic and a visit to one of the communities I've worked with on and off, Hull. And then a week of the college's end of year community learning, known as Kol-Bo. Again, incredibly emotionally intense with preparing our colleagues for ordination and realizing there's only one more rabbi who will be ordained between them and us. And we had another heatwave, and at some point in the week a classmate confirmed they are transferring to a pluralist US school from next term. This had been on the cards for a while and it makes sense for their career, but also they got sick during the interfaith conference and weren't able to join us for the final week so we didn't manage a proper goodbye. Between being recently bereaved and still not really recovered from thinking I was going to Israel and then not going and thinking everybody was going to die I wasn't doing well with keeping emotional stability through transitions. Theordination itselfwas really beautiful and I'm super proud of our new rabbis and delighted that they get to be rabbis for real now, even though it means we won't have them with us in school any more.

I will fully admit that I'm glad I didn't end up getting on a flight two days later. Intellectually it goes without saying that I would far rather Israel was in fact safe enough for me to be there, and that it had been consistently obvious it would be over the past couple of months. But personally, I am absolutely delighted to be at home. And have a chance to see my family and do fun summer things like go to concerts and have picnic dates and sort out practical things that I've let slip with the intensity of everything since Mum got sick. I even managed to overlap in London with

redbirdand her partners this week, which was an unexpected and wonderful bonus. Among many chill, non-urgent summer plans I am hoping to be a bit more present here.

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I missed my anniversary of moving to DW – this has been my online home since 3 May 2009, a slightly astonishing 16 years. Anyway, the

3weeks4dreamwidthannual fest is ongoing, and I am not doing any particular posting challenges or anything, but I generally think having more content here is good. Some people don't agree, they really dislike those times in early January and April-May when everybody makes resolutions to post more and the site gets busy. I'm kind of a hypocrite because I love when people commit to posting more frequently or regularly, but I never really do so myself.

But talking about random things when I happen to have time and brain is also useful! Inspired by a discussion in

agonyauntI was interested in people's thoughts about playing board games including both adults and children.When I was a kid my parents pretty much did not play games with us. They followed a parenting philosophy, which I think has some merit, that play is for children, and the less adult supervision and interference the more kids are able to explore and develop. We are four sibs close in age so we could usually find enough people to put together a game without needing parents. In the 1980s there also wasn't a great adult games market, let alone what are now called 'family' games which are specifically designed to be fun and challenging to adults while also accessible to younger children.

We did occasionally play what would now be called party games, things like charades or Pictionary, often repackaged as commercial games with physical components and some kind of scoring mechanism. Many of these were gifts from my uncle; he does have (adult) offspring now but they are a lot younger than us and when we were little he was the childfree fun uncle who preferred to have some kind of structure around spending time with children. But since our uncle was willing to play with us that set an example of playing a game being something adults could occasionally join in with. Similarly my paternal grandmother would often play cards with us, beggar-my-neighbour (which she called 'strip Jack naked') and snap when we were little, later on various forms of competitive solitaire like King's corner, and Pontoon (Blackjack), gambling for matchsticks and learning about probability.

Chess was considered improving and educational, but Mum never really learned and Dad is remarkably terrible at it (one of my earliest memories is of the first time I beat him, aged four, and not because he was letting me win but because his attention drifted and he left his queen exposed), so again, it was mostly a game we played with siblings. My mother's father was a fairly serious chess player but he didn't really know how to adjust his game to play with younger kids, so it was a completely uneven game and not really fun for either party; he died when I was 9 so we never got a chance to play on a more equal footing. The one thing we did play was bridge, weirdly; my mother thought it was socially useful to know how to play, so sent us to an elderly East End Jewish man for lessons. He was a delightful teacher and loved children. But we were really too young for bridge, I'm talking under 10, and our parents were never strong players either, but sometimes we would play a few rubbers treating it more or less as a game of luck, if you got good cards you would win. And Scrabble, from time to time, though that is another game that has the problem that it's very hard for children to give adults a decent game.

My siblings now tell me I was very annoying to play with, since I was the oldest and always wanted to play games where I could leverage my greater experience to win. Which isn't quite true, I don't doubt that I was annoying, but it was more that I wanted to play games with interesting tactics rather than games of pure luck that were mostly just reskinned snakes and ladders or ludo / sorry, especially at an age where my younger siblings were not ready for complex games. I spent a lot of time reading books of games and finding new card and word games for us to play.

As an older teen, I had a close friend who is German and introduced me to Settlers of Catan and that genre of Eurogames a few years before they hit the mass market in the UK. If you're brought up on Monopoly and Game of Life, Settlers is an absolute revelation! And it turned out to unlock entry into nerd societies at uni and as a post-grad; board gaming was my main social life during my PhD, which is unremarkable now but was quite niche in the early 2000s. Now all my partners are gamers, and I lucked into a family where adults do in fact play games with children. Not just board games, but any kind of games.

However, it's sometimes emotionally fraught. The older two are natural gamers and have always been happy to play with adults, including being comfortable with fairly complex games from an early age. But it was always much more difficult with A; he likes games in some ways, but also, especially when he was younger, found a lot of the meta stuff stressful. Games that took too long to set up, or not fully understanding the rules, or getting frustrated if there was a skill gap between him and the adults, and needing to compromise over which game to play. The parents who wrote into the agony aunt column had a similar experience, their kid 'begged' for games but would panic over losing. And I know a lot of my friends have reported disliking games because they were forced to play as children and punished for not having socially accepted emotional responses. Or because they played with horrible gatekeepery peers who didn't have the patience to teach games to relatively inexperienced players and belittled them for mistakes. I think we're doing better with G, nearly 5: she is, on a good day, cognitively able to play games aimed at much older age groups, but there's still the issue that sometimes the game takes too long, losing can be stressful, it's not fair that sometimes it's someone else's turn to choose which game we play, and so on. And I am worried that we're kind of pressuring her into playing because it's a way to get adult attention, but maybe she would enjoy other kinds of attention more. I think one thing we've all got better at, especially me, is just accepting that sometimes you can have fun for 20-30 minutes, but you don't get to finish the game because the kid just doesn't have the attention span, and that's fine.

I think a big part of it is verbal and numerical literacy. My sibs and I were all very precocious readers and had no problem reading the rules for ourselves and playing games where a lot of the information is contained in text on the cards. And we could add up the score and therefore have a clear sense of who was winning or which moves would give lots of points. But for more typical children there's a phase where they understand game tactics but are still at a disadvantage because of simply being less fluent; indeed some games can't really be played at all between people who can read and people who can't, because you need to be able to read and act on secret information, or you have to understand multiplication and probability to come out with a good score.

Some people have suggested starting with co-op games; there are some brilliant ones available nowadays, Pandemic and Flash Point and Library Labyrinth for all ages, Jim Deacove's series which scale in complexity for different ages, from pre-school to teens. I think those help in the sense that they make losing less upsetting, but I also think that the reason children (and many adults!) can find games emotionally taxing isn't only the danger that they might lose. There's still the frustration of waiting for your turn, of not quite having the skill to play the game well, or not being able to read the board position to predict the outcome. And I think adult-child co-op games have the strong risk that the adults will just 'play for you'; if you play against someone with way more experience than you you might lose, but if you play theoretically on the same team as the more experienced player, then at best your contributions are being indulged rather than really valued, and at worst you don't really get to play at all.

Some games lend themselves to offering a handicap to some players, some really don't. It probably depends a lot on the exact personality of the kid; do they feel good about winning more often, or patronized because their opponents deliberately didn't play their best game and gave them a chance, or even bent the rules a bit to give them an advantage? Is it helpful to use house rules to shorten or simplify the game or curb the use of dominating tactics? That can easily have the downside that not everybody is as fully aware of the house rules as you hope, there may be misunderstandings, and also, if the game is well designed to be balanced, changing the rules to please someone finding it stressful might actually make for a worse game.

Please tell me what you think! Did you play with your caregivers as a child, and if applicable do you play with the kids in your life now? What works to have a calm, enjoyable game when there is a big difference in skill levels?

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As posted under lock, my mother died on 11 March.She had been seriously ill for a long time, but on a level where she was able to power through with her considerable willpower. And then she more or less speed-ran the last stages of illness and decline in just a few weeks. She had the sort of funeral that you earn by being deeply involved in all aspects of the community, and then my family sat shiva to a greater or lesser degree. Being a rab student meant that I was encouraged and supported to actually sit through the full thing, I put my life on hold and more or less stayed in my parents' home for the week.

There was a weekend in between and I went back to college, which is full of people who are professionally experienced at looking after bereaved people. My extremely wonderful partners arranged for me to join morning prayers on Zoom for every day of the 30 when I didn't have access to in-person services. I would definitely never pressure anyone to say Kaddish every day but I found it really helpful. By the last week I realized I was starting to think creatively about the little services, and how to engage the kind people who showed up to help me through the mourning ritual.

The traditional 30 days of intense mourning for a parent ended precisely on the eve of Passover. My siblings had agreed that we wanted to have as close as possible to the kind of family Pesach we have always had with Mum. I was very afraid of trying to do this, both practically and emotionally. But actually P'tite Soeur took over the project management, something she is very good at, and we shared out the cooking between us. And we compromised by not inviting anyone beyond immediate family, so we were 15 around the Seder table rather than 20 or more. Thuggish Poet lead the service, and took the radical step of reading excerpts from the actual story in Exodus, but with a recognizable rabbinic Seder structure as well. I found it really hard, probably more than the funeral in some ways, but I'm also really proud of how well we managed.

I didn't have time to be overwhelmed by that, because I had signed up to lead both the first day of Passover morning service, and the community Seder, at a community in North London.

jackmade this possible practically by driving me down from Cambridge in the morning so I actually got eight hours sleep between our Seder and a fairly intense professional gig. It wasn't ideal to lead a complex service as my first introduction to a new community, but on the other hand only the real keenies show up first day Pesach. I came back to the flat in the afternoon and more or less stared at walls for a few hours, with supportive hugs and cups of tea from

jack, and then lead a very successful community Seder for about 80. They came from a very wide range of backgrounds with different expectations of what a Seder should be, but I think they mostly liked me.

Partly because of my recent bereavement, but mainly because of extremely awkward timing with Easter, I didn't manage to run a second Seder with family of choice this year, and I was a bit sad about that, but it was quite nice to have a relaxed week once the first intense day was past. Since then I've been getting stuck into my course again, and doing more community work and generally continuing like before but more sad.

My next big thing is that college are insisting we absolutely have to spend the summer in Israel. I don't want to, mainly because I don't think it's ethical, partly because I'm not convinced it's safe, and a small amount because I just don't want to be away from my people for several weeks, especially not far enough away that the only way to get home is several hours' flight. After much soul-searching I've come to the conclusion that I don't want to burn the amount of goodwill it would take to refuse to go. So I'm going to spend a few weeks studying at the pluralist yeshiva,Pardes. I think the actual studying will be great, even if I don't want to be there.

If you want to tell me I'm a horrible person for allowing myself to be pressured into going, well, you're probably right. If you want to be helpful, please recommend me good resources for working on my modern Hebrew over the next couple of months. I know about Duolingo and will probably put in a little bit of graft there, but ideally I want to listen to and read Hebrew media. At the moment I'm putting on Kan Bet (Hebrew language talk radio, I think more or less equivalent to Radio 4) in the background, and it is definitely helping with immersion, but I could do with something more interesting, basically. Indie radio or podcasts or a series or something. My language skills are at a rather awkward level; I am not a beginner and my strong classical Hebrew helps quite a lot, but I can't exactly follow spoken Hebrew at natural pace, I can sometimes get the gist depending on the topic and the accent of the speaker. So I think that means I'm at a level where I will get better with just lots of exposure, but any more structured recommendations would be welcome.

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My extremely awesome girlfriend managed to get us tickets for the stage production ofBallet Shoes, a book we both imprinted on. Which meant we actually managed to do the thing I'm always hoping for of a proper date-date Friday night on a weekend when I'm doing community work Saturday.

I stayed in my lovely flat after class, which is really simplifying everything compared to last year when I was staying in people's spare rooms and had to clear out Thursday morning.

ghoti_mhic_uaithas some slightly awkward dietary restrictions at the moment, so with the timing of getting across London we ended up grabbing a rushed supper in Leon by Waterloo.

The play itself was really worth seeing! I was nervous I'd end up disappointed with any adaptation of a childhood favourite, but it was very much in the spirit of the book. The scenery was amazing, absolutely lovely representation of a cluttered collector's home. And it was really well cast. Not unusually for the National, the cast were much more visibly ethnically diverse than the audience; they'd clearly chosen the best actors for the roles rather than the ones who look like people's expectation of Edwardian children's books, and then slightly altered the script to fit the appearances of the actors. Since the whole point of the story is that the sisters aren't biologically related, it made perfect sense for them to come from various backgrounds. Mr Simpson is played by an Asian actor, so he becomes Mr Saran, an explicitly Asian character. Theo Dane's actor is Black, so she is played as an American expat with a Southern accent. They also had the same, male, actor doubling as GUM and Madame, which was really well done and not at all laughing at him for effectively a drag role. Lots of male chorus members also played girls in the female-dominated crowd scenes.

I was really impressed with how well the three sisters acted the part of starting out as untrained actors and dancers gradually learning their craft over the course of the play! It's tricky for a good actor to pretend to be a bad actor. The three sisters are played by adults, which sort of relates to comments in the book where under 12s can't really play major professional roles, whereas nowadays it's pretty unusual for even teenagers to play 13 and 15yos. So you had to suspend disbelief a bit to think that these obvious adults were 11, 13 and 15, but it was pretty well done.

Generally they stuck pretty closely to the book, but adapted it sensibly to be a play rather than exactly following the original. They slightly changed the ending, but in a way that makes if anything more sense than how it goes in the book, and with fundamentally the same outcome. They make Dr Jakes explicitly a lesbian, inserting a dialogue with Pauline about the topic and using words like lesbian, sapphic and even Queer which felt a little anachronistic. But they do this at the expense of killing off Dr Smith, which I'm a bit sad about. I mean, nice to make the subtextual lesbian rep not so sub, but they book gives us a happy relationship, not a tragic widow. I was less sad about Mr Saran being single and available to romance Sylvie; why not? In fact Sylvie is much more of a character than in the books, with quite a bit of emphasis on the fact that she herself was an orphan adopted by GUM and not much older than the girls she ends up as the guardian for. That's partly because I relate more to the adult characters now that I'm older than most of them rather than a child reader, but I think it was also a shift in emphasis by the stage production. One change I did not like was that they ruined Winnifred's character, making her annoying and mannered rather than highly competent but not rich or pretty enough to get lead roles.

One thing I loved was that they actually show you scenes from the excessively modernMidsummer Night's Dreamwhere the sisters play fairies, and it's gorgeous! Not at all how I imagined it, but absolutely perfect early 20th century avant garde. There were also some fairly cliched, but very nicely done, scenes from the point of view of Madame remembering her youth in imperial and then revolutionary Russia. We had to look up when the book was actually published; I had vaguely placed it as shortly after WW2, and

ghoti_mhic_uaitas a few years earlier than the real date of 1936. It actually does rather matter when it's set, even though its focus is really local. It's very much in the shadow of WW1 and the character of Madame as a Russian exile makes really good chronological sense.

We also had a really interesting discussion about how we related to the book when we were the target age for it, particularly in terms of how we read Petrova the tomboy. Neither of us was at all a tomboy but we weren't girly girls either. I thought that Petrova was the character you were obviously supposed to relate to, and it didn't worry me that much that her gender presentation was a bit different from mine. K felt more alienated by the implication that gender non-conforming girls have to be interested in cars and aeroplanes rather than dance and theatre.

Anyway, we managed to catch the last show of the run, but apparently there is going to be a reprise later in the year, so if this review makes you want to see it you still have a chance!

The reason it made sense to go to the theatre was that Saturday I was working at Mosaic Liberal in North London.The rabbi there is a recent graduate so I know her quite well; she warned me that things could get a bit politically fraught around news coming from Israel. This is an ongoing issue since October 7th 2023, but it was particularly acute this week as we've just learned that the baby and toddler sibling Israeli hostages were killed along with their mother. Fundamentally the issue is not that our (Progressive) communities have a lot of militant Zionists, but that many many British Jews have direct personal connections with Israelis including those murdered in the initial attack, the hostage families, and others. But we rarely have direct personal connections with any Palestinians. So there can be conflict between people who just don't want to hear anything sympathetic to the Palestinians as it seems callous when people they know directly are suffering because of Hamas' actions, and people who think it's unjust to care more about the suffering of Israelis than the much larger numbers of victims and bereaved who are Palestinian.

So I did a lot of acknowledging the emotions in the room, and gave a sermon about how it's wrong to kill the innocent even during a war situation, and reminded people of our core Progressive Jewish values of social justice. Also made sure to use a version of the prayer for Israel that explicitlyasks God to protect Palestinians. I think I handled this ok; I got the impression that people with a range of different political stances felt heard and cared for, and nobody got angry with me for being insufficiently partisan or too partisan in one direction or the other. Nor for trying to avoid the issue that is on everybody's minds because it's too political and difficult to talk about.

The annoying thing is that the community somehow managed to lose (quite likely accidentally tidy up or take home) my tallit. I put it in a safe place for five minutes while we went to make Kiddush, the ritual sharing of food that happens after the service, with the other two communities who share the same building, but when I came back to fetch it it was gone. They are trying to retrieve it for me and hopefully that will work out, but it's a big nuisance!

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I was very interested in Jude Doyle'sTERFs, Trans Mascs and Two Steve Feminism, and even more so in

sbqr'sthinky response.

I don't strongly care about Doyle's beef with Moira Donegan, but everything else he says about comparing the discrimination he experiences as a trans man with how he was treated as a mildly well known feminist presumed-woman is interesting. As is the 'Two Steves' model, that gender is a word for two overlapping things, a deeply felt sense of personal identity and also a social construct used to make people in the 'woman' class lesser. This problem has been an ongoing source of contention among my social group, with people I consider to be coming from well-intentioned places ending up on opposite sides.

sqbrhas some great clarifications and expansions on the Doyle piece. I very much appreciatedAnd some really good examples of how cis women can be sexist and transphobic even if we're starting with good intentions.

I'm pretty sure I'm not secretly a TERF. I am not and never have been a radical feminist, I do not at all believe that sexism is the root of all oppressions or that men are inherently the Oppressor class, and I basically always prefer liberalism over radicalism (I am shading towards the more radical side on climate catastrophe, but basically I want tolerance and diversity within a functioning society, not revolution or separatism). I believe strongly in intersectionality and for many years I refused to identify as a feminist because I thought feminism required me to hate trans women and hating trans women is just bigotry as far as I'm concerned. But I think I am somewhat guilty of what Doyle calls out in his piece, of being prejudiced against trans men on the grounds that they are, well, men, and therefore assuming that they are advantaged rather than oppressed by the patriarchy.

On a related note, I very much resonated with this piece by

Being raised as a woman has some huge inherent disadvantages even if you ultimately decide you're not one ... Acknowledging this disadvantage does not mean implying that being raised as a man always has equivalent advantages

kiya:Better Days Were On Their Way, as well as the linked Grace Petrie anthem,about the specific brain damage that comes of having been in high school in the 90sI have a very different experience of gender from

kiyaand in a different continent at that, but I think we must be very close to the same age.So we were for the most part alone, and we knew to be afraid.I knew zero out gay people at school, and almost none in my wider circles. A couple of friends tried to come out to me and I didn't respond well because I didn't understand their necessarily coded language, so probably they thought I wasbasically more or less straight and cisand likely dangerous with it.

I definitely don't want to presume, but maybe this is an avenue of solidarity with trans men: a partially shared experience of being perceived as cis girls in a world where it was not only dangerous to be anything at all other than straight and binary gendered, but almost impossible to imagine anything else. Which is not at all to say that I think trans men are actually women, that would be a really offensively wrong opinion. But maybe we have in common the samedangerand the same deliberately engineered ignorance affected people from lots of different genders and sexualities and backgrounds.

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I think the idea is something like, five things in your bag that say something about you:




Anyway, I have somehow stumbled over the finish line at the end of term, including a 13th week of 12 for annoying bureaucratic reasons. Since we are on a semester system I am still in the semester though. I have an observed service to lead this Shabbat, and six essays due in the next few weeks, and two big scary exams mid-January. One of my classmates has banned us from talking about 'breaks' or 'rest', but it is also a month before I have to return to college and not having classes is at least a little less tiring than having them.

• Two sets of keys, because I live half my time with my husband in Cambridge and half my time in a flat in North London near my course. My home-home keys are on a Golem keyring which my husband bought me some years ago; I was a bit nervous about deliberately bringing a Golem into the house but it turned out not to be very cursed. Flat keys don't have a proper keyring. I keep looking for one and being spoiled for choice or being too mean to spend over £5 on a keyring.
  
  
• My security pass for the campus where my rabbinical school is. I am, in fact, a student rabbi, so this one is pretty informative. The campus is very extremely gated with lots of security guards milling around; this is mainly for the protection of the multiple Jewish primary schools that share the site, but potentially we could be a target also. Most of the actual threat comes from far right 'classically' antisemitic groups, but increasingly leftwing activists seem to assume that threats against Jewish children aren't a real problem because the children might be "Zionists".
  
  
• Asthma inhalers. I've had asthma since I was 4-ish, I think probably triggered by a viral infection. (Yes, viruses sometimes had long-term consequences even before Covid.) It's not very bad, it's controlled by said medication, and I've only had one scary asthma attack since I was 12.
  
  
• 3M Aura N95 mask. I reuse the officially disposable ones until either the thin elastic straps snap, or they get visibly grey from particles in the horrible London air. There seems to be pretty good evidence that the filters last basically forever, but the seal does get worse if you keep reusing them. I could be doing better with mask quality, but I reckon my biggest risk is that I do sometimes remove my mask to eat or for public speaking, so getting a super extra awesome mask feels like diminishing returns.
  
  
• Not much else other than my phone and wallet; during the Time of Isolation I basically stopped carrying a handbag, because if I did go out it was just for my officially allowed Daily Exercise or to meet the people in my bubble. And I liked the freedom of not having a big bag on me, so when I did restart going to places, I deliberately downsized. My bag is big enough for the above essentials, but small enough that I don't carry around a bunch of crap just because I can. Sometimes it's annoying that it's too small to carry a paperback book, notebook or A4 paper folded in half, but mostly this change has improved my life

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