Back by Popular Demand

Posted at 4:30 PM, Friday, October 17, 2008

Having been overwhelmed by fan mail (two e-mails, a comment over the phone, and a personal comment), I have been inspired to return to blogging. I'm going to attempt a modest entry each week, with time off for good behaviour. We'll see how long it lasts.

It's Sukkot here in Adelaide and elsewhere. (Jon Stewart's translation of Sukkot: Let's see how many Jewish holidays we can fit into one month.) Sukkot is the harvest holiday which, of course, falls in the late spring here. The first few days were beautifully cool, but now the temperature is fast approaching 85 degrees, with an even hotter day promised for tomorrow. Nevertheless, we will make good on our promise to Yonatan and Nadav that they can sleep out in the sukkah tonight.

Our sukkah is sort of a jerry-rigged affair, made out of the rather delicate 2x1's that Bobby happened to have available for this purpose. It doesn't look at all sturdy, but it's made it so far, with only an additional four days to go. The walls and roof are bamboo curtains. This tip thanks to Rabbi Jeremy Lawrence of Sydney's Great Synagogue, who was extensively interviewed on ABC Radio National's religion show "The Spirit of Things" giving a learned discourse on the vast quantity of Jewish holidays that fall out at this time of year. He himself now has one of those cool spring-loaded sukkahs that basically assembles itself (now on sale in the US for the low LOW price of $880). We will salvage the bamboo curtains at the end of the festival and use them to try to shade our west-facing windows as the sun strengthens.

I bought a string of coloured lights at Australia's Walmart equivalent Big-W, and Yonatan and Nadav now both believe they've died and gone to heaven. The lights are draped decoratively around the sukkah and flash in an apparently endless varieties of patterns. Before they were added to the sukkah, Nadav spent the better part of an afternoon in our darkened hallway, mesmerized by the beauty of the lights. For kids suffering a certain degree of Christmas deprivation, these appear to have provided a much-needed remedy.

We went for two years without a sukkah. Two years ago, we moved into our first house as the holiday began. We ate outside, sitting on the floor because we didn't yet have a table and chairs. Last year, we were in the midst of getting ready to move out of that house and into our current residence. It has been a pleasant surprise to see how much easier it is to observe Sukkot now that the boys are old enough to help carry dishes out to the sukkah for meals. What a difference! By next year, I'm hoping we'll have a sukkah with a little more thought behind it that we can keep stored 51 weeks of the year.

What else is new? We are gearing up for summer by mulching the fruit trees and sprouting tomatoes. The grape vines that I cut back last autumn have returned with a vengeance; some of the leaves really do look large enough to stuff. Our new next-door neighbour asked for permission to help herself to some leaves; her sister is the one with the patience to make stuffed grape leaves. Maybe we'll get a few?