your faithfulness in the morning

I just wrote one of the stranger emails of my fifteen years online. Here's a snip:

I'm leading Kaballat Shabbat at my minyan tomorrow night, which is very exciting. I don’t do this much, I am not super experienced. I just love my community and I love singing so I want to bring some beautiful music and hopefully not screw it up.

All week I have not been able to get the beautiful “Mizmor Shir Lyom HaShabbat” out of my head – you know the one, the one that everyone in Jerusalem was singing no matter where I went to davven. Including KZ when I was there, and you were leading, so I figured maybe I could ping you for assistance. For the life of me I CANNOT nail the middle part. I wonder if through the magic of email you can help a girl out?

Since I know the tune, can you clue me in to how the words go in the middle part? Can you sort of type out the middle for me, so I know which words to repeat? I obviously know the text and the tune, but not how to fit one to the other.

I proceeded to type out all the words I know and all the looooooong notes so that my friend could show me where to make looong words and short ones to the tune I know.

Really, this is very absurd. Why do I feel like sharing it with my 6 lonely readers? I suppose that it is a clue to the strange Jewish life I lead, connected by funny little internet connections to people halfway across the world who help me out with music I'm going to sing in downtown San Francisco. Why don't I have a rabbi in SF that I can call up and ask? I don't know.


If you haven't read it, let me recommend Stephen Marche's Raymond and Hannah, which I read today. What a weirdly perfect book to read a week after rerturning from Jerusalem! I only read it because it was assigned by my new book club, but it was - again - as if some guiding force was pushing me around, having me read things for a reason. (My therapist HATES when I talk like this.) Why the fuck was I sitting here today reading a book about a girl who goes to Jerusalem to study at Pardes?! How weird is that?

It made me - of course - want to go back. Would that I were having lusty sex, beef with broccoli and naked whiskey toasts with a Canadian academic while packing my bags for yeshiva!