When it was warmer, back in the fall, I met an older friend outdoors for coffee. A third person was there, someone she wanted me to meet. She couldn\u2019t imagine how I\u2019d never met them before. Winnipeg is like this, small enough so that everyone might have a few connections in common. Big enough that, actually, you don\u2019t know everybody either. As it turned out, my new acquaintance was someone in the Jewish community. By the end of our meeting, I\u2019d learned that she really didn\u2019t like when new melodies were introduced at services. I suggested that it was important to keep learning, that the melodies themselves weren\u2019t what was important. And that, in fact, some of the \u201cnew\u201d melodies introduced were pretty old themselves, but just hadn\u2019t been used at the congregation she\u2019d attended.<\/p>\n
She wasn\u2019t to be swayed. As we parted, it was clear that I liked the changing tunes and she, most certainly, did not. This exchange came to mind because at the Saturday morning Shabbat service I attended (via streaming only) on Jan. 1, Adon Olam was sung to \u2013 snort \u2013 the tune of Auld Lang Syne.<\/p>\n
All this came to mind, too, as I considered the Jan. 5 anniversary of when I started studying Daf Yomi<\/em>, a page of Talmud a day. This year, in 2022, I\u2019ll have pursued this endeavour for two years. I\u2019ll be a fourth of the way through the commitment. At a page a day, this process takes seven-and-a-half years. For me, it\u2019s mostly a solitary practice. I study late at night before I go to sleep, and only occasionally learn with others during a special class or siyyum<\/em> (celebration when finishing an entire tractate).<\/p>\n I read mostly in English translation, only reading the Hebrew and Aramaic in chunks when I\u2019m not too tired or struggling too much with the text. It\u2019s not perfect, but it\u2019s what I\u2019ve got for now. It\u2019s enriched my Jewish learning and practice. Now I find answers for many things I never knew before \u2013 the information has always been there, spelled out in the Babylonian Talmud.<\/p>\n For instance, I read in the tractate Megillah, on page 21, about the seemingly arbitrary rules we set up for ourselves \u2013 like how many parshiyot<\/em> (Torah portions) we read, how many people can read each one and when. For the Megillah reading on Purim, we can sit or we can stand, we can hear one person read or several. How does this work?<\/p>\n I flashed back to all the different ways I\u2019d heard the Megillah or even read it through the years, from spiels and Purim carnivals as a kid and onward. I remembered when I read the Megillah to myself in an airport on the floor, on a long layover between flights.<\/p>\n One snowy, cold Purim, crammed into a smaller, overheated, crowded room at Chabad, one of my twins nearly passed out in his polar bear costume. I rushed him through the open fire door, into the hallway, to the emergency stairwell. His colour returned as he cooled down. This, too, was a place to hear the Megillah.<\/p>\n Before my son nearly passed out, I remember that we were sitting near someone who smiled at us, in the integrated seating (men and women sat together) area. He was familiar, part of the community. Only later, it turned out he had a date in court for something that went very wrong. This also is community.<\/p>\n I thought a lot about variations to traditional practice last week as we watched services, streaming, on Shabbat morning. It was a bitterly cold morning in Winnipeg, the kind when the windchill is -45 and you feel remarkably lucky if your car starts. Except, because of COVID, we didn\u2019t have to decide to stay home or go. On Jan. 1, there were only three people in the sanctuary. Two people ran the service, and one person did the streaming.<\/p>\n A service must be adaptable. One person, the cantorial soloist, read the entire Torah portion \u2013 a real feat, she did a beautiful job. So, I thought, here we have a tradition with a lot of rules, a lot of \u201cways things should go,\u201d but also, to keep our traditions strong, we build flexibility.<\/p>\n In Megillah 21a, it says, if it\u2019s the custom to say a blessing before the reading of the Megillah where you are, say a blessing. If not, don\u2019t. Later, it explains, yes, here are the blessings to say and it\u2019s good to say a blessing, but it\u2019s a truly open discussion. Do what works and is usual where you are.<\/p>\n In the midst of the Omicron wave, I hear a lot of random but repeated comments: \u201cin-person schooling is much better\u201d is one. However, safety and avoiding healthcare collapse really must come first, in my view. In our family, during most of the 2021-2022 school year, we did remote schooling. I worked, writing at night. As a former teacher, I was able to help my kids learn and guess what? They came out of it better academically prepared than they were previously. What does this mean? There is no one size fits all. There\u2019s no perfect way to be.<\/p>\n We are all different. Yes, we need to work together, as individuals and communities, to acknowledge this pandemic challenge. We must choose to do everything we can to be as safe as we can: vaccinate, wear high-quality masks like N95s, stay home as much as possible, social distance, self-isolate when sick, etc. But, there isn\u2019t just a single way to take care of a community. That\u2019s what Torah \u2013 and the talmudic tractate Megillah 21 \u2013 tell us. There isn\u2019t just one way.<\/p>\n Joanne Seiff<\/strong> has written regularly for CBC Manitoba and various Jewish publications. She is the author of three books, including <\/em>From the Outside In: Jewish Post Columns 2015-2016, a collection of essays available for digital download or as a paperback from Amazon. Check her out on Instagram @yrnspinner<\/a> or at joanneseiff.blogspot.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When it was warmer, back in the fall, I met an older friend outdoors for coffee. A third person was there, someone she wanted me to meet. She couldn\u2019t imagine how I\u2019d never met them before. Winnipeg is like this, small enough so that everyone might have a few connections in common. Big enough that, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[20750,9609,218,8302],"class_list":["post-38116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-op-ed","tag-covid","tag-daf-yomi","tag-judaism","tag-lifestyle"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}