How to Spell Chanukah...And Other Holiday Dilemmas Read Online Free PDF

housemates and several of their friends, most of whom are weekly regulars. I can’t overstate the wonder and joy of finding like-minded people gathered here for Shabbat, for Chanukah, for eating and hanging out. It’s that most rare of religious phenomena: organic. One of Sarah’s friends rolls two enormous blunts (“For après-Shabbos,” he says with a grin). In the kitchen, her housemates are ritually washing their hands while they make up an intricate rap—two play human beat box while the third interweaves the bracha and something about his “Shabbos bitches”—about, yes, ritual hand washing. Jackie watches them, agape.
    â€œThey’re always doing that,” Sarah sighs.
    First we light the menorah, and tonight everyone in the room knows the words and sings loudly along. Then we light the Shabbat candles, with, again, everyone join­ing in. Then we feast. Then we smoke the blunts. “In the basement!” Sarah insists. “But it’s Shabbos!” we plead. She relents.
    When I go into the kitchen to frost the cupcakes I find Jackie already arranging the pink sugar letters into words on each one. She’s diligently arranged “fun hole,” “eat me,” “tits,” “poop,” “ass wipe,” “fuck,” “balls,” “jizz,” and a couple others even I won’t repeat. Sounds infantile, maybe, but in our collective state of gladness they are the height of wit and creativity. Especially, of course, as the letter supply dwindles and we are forced to be extra inventive with spelling.
    Is this what our parents had in mind for us when they chauffeured us to day school, Hebrew school, and bat mitzvah lessons? Is this what they hoped for when they waved good-bye and sent us off to that Lord of the Yid Flies summer camp? Pornographic vegan cupcakes, Shabbos blunts, al netilat yadayim woven intricately into a rap in a house high up on a hill in the Pacific Northwest? I must say that I think so. At first glance, the above might seem like religious perversion, but scratch the surface and you’ll see a roomful of young Jews claiming that identity in the context of countless other identities. Dig deeper and you’ll find a roomful of Jews owning Judaism—and loving it—in a way no easy parochial regurgitation or rote spawning could ever approach. Oh, how I wish that kindly and completely misguided old rabbi could be here with us now. If we could bottle this and sell it, surely we’d be knee-deep in Jewish continuity- hysteria-foundation grants. And just imagine the weed that would buy!
    VII.
    Another party tonight: New Year’s Eve, though it’s difficult to get all that amped up about a milestone so traditionally overloaded with good-time pressure. Every year it’s the same, the anticlimax so much more prevalent than the purported climax. (Like hooking up with a future Jewish pop star. Or whatever.)
    Sarah’s friends from medical school arrive in clusters. A future anesthesiologist has brought the board game Cranium, which we are to play as the evening’s entertainment. A future neurosurgeon bears a bottle of champagne in each fist. A future gynecologist brings her gangly, fifteen-year-old brother, because he had no other plans and she couldn’t bear to leave him home alone for the last/first few hours of 2005/06.
    Two old friends of Jackie’s join the party too, thankfully rounding out the left-brain contingent. We four form a Cranium team, as the med students want no part of our liberal arts asses. The med students also Just Say No, which means that our team at first appears to be at something of a disadvantage.
    Here’s a piece of advice: don’t ever play Cranium with a bunch of medical students. Especially don’t ever play Cranium with medical students if you are a) someone with an iota of perspective on board games, b) someone with an iota of perspective on