Dog Days
Posted at 3:15 PM, Monday, March 17, 2008
Both the Adelaide Festival of the Arts and the Adelaide Fringe Festival came to an end with a whimper last night. As a family, we attended a grand total of three shows during the 3 1/2 week fringe, and two of the shows were mainly for the kids. Our one foray into adult drama was the one-man show "I Might Be Edgar Allen Poe," magnificently performed by Canadian actor David Hayward. The play portrays a psychiatric patient who finds refuge from his own traumas in Poe's tumultuous life. The dramatic recitation of "The Tell-tale Heart" alone was worth the $20 admission. The Adelaide Advertiser named the show a "must-see," but fewer than thirty people braved 105 degree heat to come to the Prometheus nightclub for the play. We had ambitious plans for the Fringe, but the heat managed to drain all of that away.
It turns out that the last beautiful days of festival season were the first weekend of March, when we were out and about nearly the whole time. We spent a lovely evening watching street performers, and then walked up to North Terrace for the spectacle Northern Lights, in which the city's iconic stone buildings were illuminated with a number of different colorful projections. That particular exhibit--part of the Festival of the Arts--has proved so popular that the show has been extended for another two weeks. The day after we spent a night out, the temperatures soared, and few people have had the energy or enthusiasm to venture out for culture. A number of my congregants did attend the outdoor music festival Womadelaide, and most were very enthusiastic about the experience despite the heat. We will hope to go next year, and will hope even more that the weather is more cooperative!
Just about the only thing this weather is good for is performing conversions, and so I've done two in the last two days. Judaism requires full-body immersion in a pool containing fresh water as the final step of the conversion process. This is usually done at a mikvah--a very small swimming pool mixed with water from a freshwater source. Mikva'ot are very expensive to build and maintain. With a few notable exceptions, mikva'ot are generally run under the auspices of Orthodox Jews, whose women are expected to visit the mikvah monthly at the conclusion of their menstrual cycles. Pittsburgh has a magnificent mikvah which is available for both Orthodox and non-Orthodox rabbis to use for purposes of conversion. Here in Australia, there is not a single mikvah which is open for use by non-Orthodox rabbis. If I want to immerse a candidate in water, I need to take that person to the ocean. And since the mikvah needs to be performed completely naked, this tends to happen very early in the morning.
Yesterday and this morning, a number of dedicated witnesses arrived at the beach at 7:00 a.m. It's amazing how many others were up at that hour, walking their dogs along the beach or even swimming in the water. It was already 86 degrees and the water was warmed by the sun, so the experience was relatively painless. We all waded out until we were about chest-high in the water, and then our conversion candidates disrobed. Yesterday, we had enough women in the water to form a protective circle around our candidate as she dunked and offered the required blessings. This morning, I brought a sheet along and suspended it between our candidate and the beach. I will not look forward to doing this when the weather gets colder, but I am looking forward to being able to walk outside without gasping!