She-mix-ni Atzeret

Tonight starts Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, the final round of Jewish holidays -- for this month, anyway! Here's a little mix that I stumbled into putting together, song by song. This morning at synagogue I was getting ready for Shemini Atzeret, which starts tonight, looking ahead in the prayerbook -- you know, like peeking at the ending. One thing I always forget is the Prayer for Rain, Tefilat Geshem, which is the beginning of the rainy season in Israel. Which immediately stuck this song in my head. It's not exactly a part of the traditional liturgy, but I've been singing this song longer than I've been praying:

The celebration kept coming, and so did the songs. The new Y-Love video, the first song from his upcoming album, is out today. (And the album has a shout-out to my book! And it features Andy Milonakis, who's the weirdest and most original thing on MTV right now.

And, just to tie everything together, our house guest just wandered through the room and heard the song. "Oh!" he said. "Is that the new Drake video?" I had no idea what he was talking about. "I thought you'd know," he said. Apparently, the platinum-selling hip-hop artist Drake has a new single, too, and in the video, he and his companions are drinking Bartenura Moscato D'Asti -- which my older daughter calls "blue wine" and which is the only kind of wine my mother drinks. It's bubbly and sweet and basically like alcoholic soda. It makes family meals tons more fun...and is there any wonder that it's the beverage of choice among Jewish soul singers?

Once again, here's the money shot: Happy Shemini Atzeret!

Talmud FAIL: Yalta vs. Ulla

Most of my favorite Talmud stories center around Yalta. She's a Talmud-era commentator who's sometimes thought to be Rav Nachman's wife (the Talmudic sage, not the Hasidic rebbe) and is also sometimes thought to be the daughter of the Rosh Galuta, the head of the world Jewish community at the time. And she was an arbiter of Jewish law and philosophy in her own right.

We also named our daughter after her. There are two famous stories in the Talmud -- seven in total, but two that are really famous -- that center around her. One involves Rav Nachman coming to her and asking what to do if you hunger for non-kosher food (she schools him). The other goes as follows (courtesy of halakhah.com):

Ulla was once at the house of R. Nahman. They had a meal and he said grace, and he handed the cup of benediction to R. Nahman. R. Nahman said to him: Please send the cup of benediction to Yaltha.

(OK -- now Ulla's gonna get really crabby. Especially considering he's a guest in the home of an honored rabbi...not to mention, of course, Yalta.)

He said to him: Thus said R. Johanan: "The fruit of a woman's body is blessed only from the fruit of a man's body, since it says, He will also bless the fruit of thy body." It does not say the fruit of her body, but the fruit of thy body. It has been taught similarly: Whence do we know that the fruit of a woman's body is only blessed from the fruit of a man's body? Because it says: He will also bless the fruit of thy body. It does not say the fruit of her body, but the fruit of thy body.

(That was Ulla showing off and being a smart@$$ -- and, basically, saying that women suck. Now comes the good part.)

Meanwhile Yaltha heard, and she got up in a passion and went to the wine store and broke four hundred jars of wine. R. Nahman said to him: Let the Master send her another cup. He sent it to her with a message: All that wine can be counted as a benediction. She returned answer: Gossip comes from pedlars and vermin from rags.

...and THAT, my friends, is how you deliver the whiz-bang kung-fu punch to an honored rabbi: with a combination of physical force and a good proverb. Apparently, people are still taking this to heart today. Courtesy of FAILblog:

Gourmet Jews, Kosher Wine & Cheese Tastings, and Hasidic Beer Parties

On the way out of his goodbye party last night, my doppelganger-in-name Shimon Roth grabbed me and said, "Are you gonna write about this on your website?" Usually, I hate those questions, but between Shimon's good-natured drunkenness on one of his last nights in Crown Heights and the sheer Hasidic wackiness of our day, there was no way I couldn't say yes.

It started at about four P.M., when we went to a kosher wine and cheese tasting at BenZ's Gourmet. If you don't know, wine and cheese are two of the hardest items to find kosher, and until recently, most Orthodox Jews -- especially outside of New York -- had to put up with a very small selection of both. (To this day, when we visit Melbourne, my in-laws order us to bring back as much cheese as our suitcases can fit: "Anything but the processed crap!")

In the past few years, however, due to the combined force of Internet ease-of-purchasing and the greater availability of disposable income in certain demographics of the religious Jewish community, and a small but noticeable closet industry has sprung up: a Hasidic fine food industry.

Because my wife is a personal chef, I've got a bird's-eye view of the situation: In this section of the community, people are struggling to learn as much about fine food as they can, and the easiest way of investigating is with their wallets.

Thus, we rolled up to BenZ's thinking we wouldn't be the only guests with a kid in tow (we were). Instead, we found a crowd that was part gourmands (actual and aspiring), part food-industry people, and part businessmen. That last group were the easiest to spot -- they were the ones at the pouring station who were complaining that the pours were "too stingy." (Author's note: I still have to figure out the correct way to ask for more, since apparently you aren't really supposed to drink the same wine twice at a wine tasting.)

To make matters even more unspeakably complicated, the night before had been Crown Heights's first poetry slam ever (oh, geez, that's another blog entry -- remind me) and, randomly, I kept catching snatches of conversation about "the slam recital" and "hippies yelling hip-hop rhymes." I felt instantly both scandalized and famous. Add that to the fact that some middle-aged dude kept coming up to me and asking if I was Matisyahu (in Crown Heights, mind you) and it was as trippy an experience as Sunday afternoons get.

From there, it was on to Shimon's party. Straight through the door, I began getting major flashes from college: beer in a Tupperware trunk, Rock Band on the Xbox (currently playing: semi-recent Metallica) and, most telling of all, a kitchen crammed to the seams with people. Just like college, there were the token sketchily-dressed girls in a corner with know-it-all boys. Except that these girls were sketchily-dressed because they were wearing pants, and the boys were those guys in the back of the class, the ones who never paid attention but always answered the questions right.

There were the slackers -- a long-haired kid with no yarmulke who asked after my brother-in-law (he's currently locked away in a yeshiva, off becoming a rabbi in a land with no TV, internet, or women). There were the married-and-reproduced people who were trying desperately to pretend that they still had a life after dark (uh, us). There were the Upper West Side kids with one foot in the Modern Orthodox world, one foot in the secular world, who still came back to the shtetl to check in (briefly, second-guessingly) and see whether there was anyone promising to date in the Old Country. And there was one girl in a tweedy plaid shirt and skirt who I honestly couldn't tell whether she was a Williamsburg cool kid or an old-school Hasid.

And then, Shimon, on the way out, asking me if I was going to record this. I didn't answer him -- just reached into my wife's handbag and took out the gift we'd gotten him, a copy of Benyamin Cohen's My Jesus Year, a book about getting back in touch with Judaism while checking out everything but Judaism. He's moving to LA. I figured it might remind him just a little bit of the old Jewish neighborhood. You know, a place not very different from the environment that Jesus probably grew up in.

I don't know if there's a moral to this story, except to say that Hasidim live much the same lives, at least on a quotidian Sunday afternoon level, as their non-Hasidic brethren. The same things just manifest a little differently.