Rosh Hashana

Rosh means head. Hashana means the year. There is no of in Hebrew, but it's added in translation to make the thing make sense. Literally, then, Rosh Hashana means Head of the Year. Presumably, that makes Elul the ass of the year, but hey.

I got up at nine this morning. This would have pissed me off expect I got up because my body went "I've had ten hours of sleep and it's time to get up." Which I did.

We hopped off to Shul at around ten,and stayed there till one. I want to make this clear: Jewish services are LONG. You cannot go for the beginning at nine and be done for the end by eleven. You can go for the beginning at eight and maybe, if you are very good, be done by one. The Rosh Hashana set of prayers is the single longest in the entire year, beating out even Yom Kippur for sheer volume of prayer. The only people I knw who can get through all of the Rosh Hashana prayers are the Black Hatter orthodox, and they do it by saying the prayers so fast it's actually impossible to tell individual words apart. Everyone else, as at my Shul, skips a lot. Even so, we finished at one thirty.

This is typical of Jewish High Holidays ceremonies.

After shul, my family went to the annual after-services lunch. Generally, anyone younger than about twenty-five is in the basement, playing games. Which games depend on the platforms and games available, but generally there's at least one SSB:M and one card game going on, plus various other board games if people are interested.

About halfway through, we were informed that the food was out. You have to understand that this is a meal put together by 17+ Jewish households, which is to say, they all try to outclass each other in terms of quality and, above all, quantity. There is more food. Period. There is more casserole, there is more kugel, there is more cake, there are whole extra cows. I ate too much . . .

This get together goes from about eleven, when the less religious services start getting out, to sixish, when the more religious services start up again. We left around, but the thing was still in full swing.

Then we went and did Tashlikh, a very small and much more meaningful ceremony. The idea is that it's a form of symbolic cleansing. What we do is take some bread to a local river or stream. It can be tiny, but it must be flowing water. Then we say a short prayer, which is supposed to transfer the sins of the past year into the bread, and crumble the bread into the water. It's lucky if fish eats it, because it means that even your sins have done some good in the world (feeding the fish). In a slightly more orthodox version of the same thing, the ceremony is performed upon a live chicken, which is then donated to charity; the sins are transmuted into goodness because they go to feed the poor. Some groups also use money, but since you really aren't even supposed to be touching money, that's a less religious version of the same thing. But anyway. Went and did Tashlikh. No fish, though :<

Then we came home. Tomorrow, we get to do pretty much the same thing, only instead of family get-together/party, we will not be goign to the S. family and will be coming straight home. Then I bike over to BF's :D

Now, two dreams to relate, one that I didn't relate yesterday and one that I had last night.

The not-related dream involved multiple dimensions, and I think Sluggy Freelance. I don't remember much aside from what was happening on one side of the dimensional rift affected what happened on the other in unpredictable ways and the Cranbrook museum (an actual museum here in metro Detroit) and grounds had a lot to do with it . . . I think the rift was on the grounds, but can't be sure. There were 3D holograms and aerogel involved, and a lake or river, filling very fast against steep banks as in a flash flood. And there was Bun-bun, toting his usual switchblade. That's all I can remember.

The last night dream, being somewhat more recent, is more vibrant. It had to with a spacetime witch who could do weird things to the laws of physics. Her main weapons were tiny sharp slivers of some kind of fracture crystal, but it's only found in this one seaside cave. I had pissed her off, or rather, she thought I'd done something I hadn't and was pissed at me. So most of the dream was me trying to find evidence to prove my not-guilt while at the same time trying to dodge her . . . oh, and as a sideplot, there was a romance. I was apparently falling in love with a guy, which was bad because it turned out that said guy had done whatever the witch was pissed off about and accidentally framed me for it. At about the point where both I and the witch figured this out, BF showed up. Everyone did a triple-take, went WTF?!? as he then proceeded to do exposition.

I'm not quite sure what happened in the exposition, there was timeskip or something, but eventually the four of us hopped off the the island where the crystal that splinters to make knives is mined from, which through some werd cave-portal that was a few hundred feet on the inside a few hundred miles on the outsidei, and the witch and not-BF proceeded to, I very much hope, fall in love with each other

. . . and then I went swimming. I distinctly remember the smell of saltwater, Mediterranean lapis lazuli water like the coast of Marseilles or Crete or Jaffa, and then it was sunny and the sun was in my eyes and I woke up. Le sigh. Just when it was getting good . . .