Thanksgiving Table

Two weeks should enable a notable holiday.  While American in origin and practice, a Jewish element also has its place.  Rabbis in America, maybe elsewhere, debated whether turkey qualified as a Kosher bird.  It did, though I do not understand the uncertainties.  Then could Jews adopt the day as special?  It was not of pagan or idolatrous origin.  We did.  Its placement on Thursday also has a convenience.  Torah is read Thursday mornings.  In the era of automobiles, driving is prohibited on shabbos.  Many families arrange Bar Mitzvah celebrations on Thanksgiving, and now the Monday legal holidays, so that guests who would not be able to drive to the synagogue on Shabbos can attend on a weekday.  Having those days free from work also facilitates travel.  Moreover, appreciation, called Hakaras HaTov, recognition of The Good, unites Thanksgiving with a core Jewish value.

It has long been a demarcation holiday for me.  As the one who took medical call every Christmas to enable my colleagues some special time with their families, I could guarantee having Thanksgiving with my family. Once established as a kitchen maven, I could create a meal, part traditional, part surprise, that the others could not duplicate.

Now, we are empty nesters with minimal surviving family or at least readily accessible family. I anticipate only three or four at my table—three or four special people with their own preferences and idiosyncrasies.  Something special for them elevates them and challenges me.

As with most elegant kitchen intentions, I made a grid, this with twelve boxes instead of my more typical nine.

1. Motzi
2. Appetizer
3. Soup
4. Salad
5. Dressing
6. Turkey
7. Stuffing
8. Sweet Potatoes
9. Cranberry
10. Vegetable
11. Dessert
12. Beverage

I bake a bread at home.  I have my favorites.  Last year I made bialys.  This year, something in a loaf.

Appetizers challenge me.  An elegant one last year with beets, herring, and potatoes.  Simpler in presentation this year, though not necessarily in execution.  Soup and appetizer at the same meal, I rarely do.  But Thanksgiving warrants a special effort.  There are many options.  Traditional like mushroom-barley.  Seasonal like butternut squash.  Ethnic like harira.  I serve it with some elegance in a white tureen with porcelain ladle.  Salad tends to be simple.  Sometimes green, sometimes Israeli.  I gravitate to marinated salads like cucumber with red onion.  The dressing is usually incorporated into the salad recipe except for the green salad where I make the right amount of herbed vinaigrette.  Turkey depends on attendance.  For just a few, a half-turkey breast works well.  Olive oil, seasonings, roast 90 minutes, slice with an electric knife after resting.  It yields enough for me to give some to a guest for Shabbos and have some left for me the following night.  Stuffing I vary each year, though always with a basic foundation.  I find commercial stuffing cubes overpriced.  Instead, I cube my own bread, dry it in an oven, and assemble it with other ingredients.  Often I make it in a crock pot, as my oven has competition from other courses.  I've not yet tried the Instapot.  Sweet potatoes, cranberries, and apples appear in some form, either stand-alone or incorporated into something else.  Cranberry sauce with a citrus additive is simple to make.  Since it is served cold, I can make it on Wednesday, then refrigerate it.  I don't focus a lot on vegetables.  I happen to like beets, but few others share the fondness.  Easy to roast, goes well with everything else, adds unique color.  I might consider squash.  And there's green stuff:  broccoli, asparagus, haricots vert.  Cauliflower looks too pale on the plate.  Orange like carrots, my most common side vegetable, gets overwhelmed by the sweet potatoes.  Visual appeal matters here.

Desserts usually appear as a cake.  Polish apple cake is pareve.  I have recipes for puff pastry apple strudel.  Baklava is always among my favorites, though phyllo expensive and the process too tedious for other meal tasks.  

I am the only one who likes beer, but for Thanksgiving there are better options.  Many families splurge a bit on wine.  My guests shy away from alcohol.  Sparkling cider seems a compromise with something my guests would probably not buy for themselves.

There is food, and there is experience, both for me and for my guests.  Choosing them is straightforward.  Getting non-drivers to my home takes some planning, effort, and patience.  Elegance gets incorporated in different ways.  I have fine china but don't use it.  Instead, I set the table with ordinary fleishig dishes and utensils.  Bread on a tray, sliced with a serrated knife.  Appetizer on small plates.  Soup served in tureen, ladled into bowls. Salad onto the main plate, in an elegant bowl, served with either silver or wooden sets.  Turkey on a platter.  Stuffing in a bowl.  Sides in appealing bowls, plate or dishes.  Cake on a platter, served on dessert plates with dessert forks.  Stemmed goblets for the beverage.  Tea cups with saucers.  And energy reserved for the following day to wash the dishes and create a Friday night meal suitable for shabbos. 

Always worth the effort.  Planning, executing, concluding.  Many steps.  Me at my very best most of the time.

Postponed Trip

Among my most valuable senior discounts has been regional rail travel.  I have a travel free card from SEPTA, the system that operates near my home.  In my wallet, I carry an MTA card which discounts NYC transit by half.  NJ Transit which connects the two will accept my Medicare card for half off.  That makes home to NYC a no work proposition.  Drive to a SEPTA station, authorize $2 from my credit card to park, and I'm off for a cheap afternoon in Manhattan.  If I really wanted a lot of time in the Big Apple, I would either take Amtrak which will set my credit card back a lot more, both for transit and for local parking.  I could drive the NJ Turnpike to near NYC and finish the trip on the PATH commuter train or NJ Transit.  Driving seems a chore, EZ Pass gets debited each way.  I will need to park in NJ.  A lot of irritation, but more time exploring NYC attractions.

I opted to go cheap and easy, at least one time.  My miserliness comes with a significant downside.  Schedules are limited and inflexible.  SEPTA has a direct connection to NJ Transit at its main transfer point in Philadelphia.  To get there, I would have to leave home at 7AM to get a regional commuter train to Philly, then a half hour layover once in Philly, then transfer to SEPTA Trenton and a short walk from there with minimal layover to NJ Transit Trenton.  Same returning.  Easy to get back to Philadelphia from NYC, but big layover there until I can get onto the commuter train home, the penultimate one for the evening.  And winter standard time puts much of the trip home, and at the end of NYC, in the dark.  I would arrive home around 9:30PM.  So, fourteen hours in transit for about six hours of amusement in the Big Apple, or maybe even a little less.  Hardly worth it as tourism.  It may be worth it as an experience, as a challenge to convince myself that it is possible.

Travel of all types has its unproductive times.  Airports require a lot of preparatory effort.  Getting there by car, either my own with an expensive parking fee or by Uber.  Lugging stuff.  Lines at check-in and TSA screening.  Sitting at the gate.  Retrieving luggage at destination.  Finding ground transportation.  At least the distance traveled justifies a multi-day experience at the final stop.  Road trips are also multi-day, though sometimes that means an overnight stay for each day's drive before even arriving at the desired location.  And at least public conveyances allow the passenger to bring items to occupy or even advance himself during waiting time and transit.  Don't think I want to tool around NYC with a laptop in backpack.  My travel cross-chest carrier would allow a tape recorder, radio, cell phone, pens, and pads.  Books and my magazine subscriptions are now portable.  So if I travel for eight hours to get six hours, the transit time has useful possibilities.

Rain forecast.  If confirmed the day before travel, that would postpone the adventure.  The rails are mostly indoors.  NYC attractions usually require some emergence from underground.  Postponed, but not fully shelved.

Vacuuming

Floor surfaces in my house could use some attention.  I mopped the kitchen's synthetic tile floor.  A two person job with furniture repositioning.  Most of my floor surfaces, though, are carpeting.  Sturdy synthetic nylon.  Most installed when we moved into our house in 1981, with a few more recentm additions.  By the advise of most experts on home maintenance, once in book, now online.  The vacuum with rotating brush head should be allowed to clean and restore this flooring weekly.  I use my bedroom and part of the living room and the exposed parts of the family room's Berber carpet daily.  As a reward to myself for passing Endocrinology Boards I treated myself to an elegant round rug for my office, since relocated to My Space with retirement.  I step on it daily.  About once a week I do my various loads of laundry, taking the dried clothing to the living room for folding.  Residue from the carpet finds its way to the surfaces of the clothing I had just laundered.  So I got out the vacuum cleaner to make long overdue amends.

It is not like the carpets never get cleaned.  In anticipation of Passover, we arrange for formal carpet cleaning of the living room, dining room, upstairs landing, and stairs.  In order to do this, the cleaning service has to vacuum all the surfaces first.  The bedroom and My Space have neglect exceeding one year,  I made the vacuum cleaner, a modern Shark Model with YouTube access guiding me in its use, fully functional.  Empty bag.  No suction without an empty bag.  Learned how to put the rolling brush in carpet mode.  Create Zones.  Easy:  upper landing, always kept clear, and my special area rug.  Hard Zones:  my half of the bedroom which needed subzones as I moved stuff covering the floor to expose carpeting, then vacuumed, then moved some selectively back to expose another section of the royal blue velvet pile.  Did this three times.  Slightly winded but done.  Wife's side of bedroom a lost cause, no carpeting exposed beneath clothing, books, and assorted surface priorities that she has.  Still, one-person job.

Living room: two-person job.  Moving and replacing a lot of furniture, creating sub-zones.  The area near the room's entrance had its carpeting tamped down daily with contributions of outside walking ground beneath the carpet's surface to its lower pile.  I vacuumed each zone in two directions.  Between the moving and replacing of furniture, negotiating the vacuum's excessively long cord, and long swaths of surface, each cleaned in two directions, I found this unexpectedly tiring.  But accomplished in a way that I could discern an improvement when this part of the project was completed.

That leaves me with two more sections.  The dining room will be fairly easy.  Mostly chairs to move and replace.  Finally, the stairs, walked upon multiple times daily.  This one needs the tools.   I found most of them.  Family Room judged lost cause.

Those are the carpeted surfaces.  There are other surfaces, including our tiled entry hall.  This might be better cleaned with a Swiffer Kit, which I own but need to make functional.  Laundry Room with kitty litter dragged by Priscilla the Cat into the adjacent powder room and across the living room surface.  Vacuum without the brush beater, followed by mop or Swiffer.

Having done this, and also recognizing some exceeds my capacity for doing more than on rare bursts of determination, I will need to engage a professional cleaning crew.  And sooner rather than later.

My Food Is Your Food

Well, maybe not.  One of our regional heroes is an obscure Franciscan monk in the modern lineage of St. Francis of Assisi.  The current Pope adopted his name, though like all Popes he lives in splendor.  Our regional Brother does not.  He wears a hooded brown gown.  He lives simply.  But for more than forty years he has created, headed, and expanded an agency that centralizes our reach to the city's poor.  His agency provides a small amount of child care and default housing, but its central mission has been to offer meals.  For 2022, they served more than 100,000 meals.  I had the pleasure of meeting this friar many years ago when a departing medical executive opted to have his farewell reception at the agency's dining hall.  My children's Bnai Mitzvah generated sumptuous leftovers, which I transported there the following Monday.  For the Brother to accomplish this, he needs generous partners.  No group has adopted mandatory sharing of our prosperity than our Jewish community.  As community groups are solicited to take their turns providing meals, my synagogue has three sessions scheduled in the late fall every year for decades.

While this initiative should generate overflowing support from dozens of members, it doesn't seem to.  Instead, it reinforces our congregational culture, consisting of a series of fiefdoms or cliques run by and content with its few dedicated participants.  If we have good, we need not seek more than good, that view illustrates.  We can get the food cooked and served with the people we have.  They announce from the sanctuary and newsletters a few sabbaths in advance that they could use some baked goods.  I make a contribution, Kosher and in my oven, for two of the sessions, but have never been invited to join the other ladies in the home kitchen of the chairman.  

Maybe the Brother would not want me there any more than the event chair or perhaps even our Rabbi and Rebbetzin would.  There are cultural divides, perhaps even theological ones.  When I host an event at my home, kitchen experience displayed to the max most times, my kitchen output is always plentiful and elegant.  Take as much as you want.  Since we have two Challahs for Shabbos, the guest takes one home. Understandably, the friar feels this approach detrimental.  His dining center is a place of default, not celebration.  The goal for him is part rescue of an immediate situation but also a look to a future where his current consumers can become prosperous donors, able to create, enjoy, and share their own abundance.  My food is your food, eat what you like that prevails in my dining room, does not always serve people dependent on others in the best way.  The friar limits portions.  He looks at his project as a means of temporary subsistence.  While friendships and camaraderie among regular patrons likely develop, he stops short of full satiety, fearing dependence at the expense of personal growth.

While my synagogue and I each place a high value on Kosher, that same stringency is not required for the non-Jewish residents of our city who depend on the dining center for their daily, or even periodic, lunch.  And we are told that congregational members contributing food to feed these people do not need to maintain Kosher in any way.  Much of the food is prepared in the chairwoman's kitchen.  I never inquired about its kashrut.  The food is acceptable to the recipients who need it.  Yet when I contribute, the food meets the standards of my Kosher kitchen.  Should I be willing to serve a hungry person food that I would not eat myself?  Probably not as food.  Were I to give a financial contribution, there would be no restrictions on what the recipient might opt to purchase.  As a practical matter, the mission of the assigned sessions is to provide nutrition on the terms of the recipient.  It would probably not be good congregational policy to restrict baked goods donations to those made in Kosher ovens, or even with Kosher ingredients.  My food is your food, with strings attached.  Your food is not necessarily my food.  Sometimes I am the caterer, maybe a server.  Not the diner.

Our tradition has a tale of some Smart Alec asking the sage Hillel why Hashem permitted poverty when an omnipotent God could have provided adequately for everyone.  Hillel responded that God did that so people could rise to the occasion by sharing part of their larger portion.  So that is what we do as a synagogue and I do as a peripheral volunteer for that project.  Judaism seems to prefer middles.  I bake something Kosher, varying the output.  It is always created at my peak ability.  Always something that would be a little pricey for people at economic fringes to purchase from a bakery.  Always something that I've had before, both from my kitchen and high end commercially, that I especially regarded as a treat. So I share some food, restrained by the Brother's judgment on keeping his project one of nutritional default.  But in absentia and with anonymity, I also share a piece of me.  Imagination of what to offer.  Experience as a limited foodie.  The Brother cannot restrict that.

Scouting November

Must dos.  Should dos.  They are not the same.  While totally bored at a volunteer activity Halloween morning, I took a multicolored pen and writing pad out of my cross-chest carrier, then headed to an unoccupied room with desks and chairs on the second floor.  Setting the pen to its green option, I began jotting down all the tasks for the month that would commence the following day.  Twenty-two items with three added later.  The only truly mandatory on the list seems to be keeping a cardiology appointment made more than six months earlier.  I think I have symptoms to discuss, and never leave the exam room without either the doctor or her NP thinking I should return for a test of some type.  Changing the clocks to Eastern Standard Time probably counts as mandatory, assigned to a single night.  I suppose Thanksgiving is another fixed appointment that cannot be changed, though I did cancel dinner on short notice two years back when my wife took ill.  Other things have deadlines in November.  A synagogue dinner.  A short-story writing contest that I am willing to fork over $25 to have my submission turned down.  Baking a treat for the charitable organization that my congregation supports.  My wife's choral group has a concert I need to attend.  Some things will happen irrespective of my participation.  The Election.  I voted early and will know who got elected in due time.  Flu shot would be a good idea.  My Osher Institute classes continue through November.

Mostly, though, things that I want to do dominate the list.  I will need to withdraw the minimums from my two IRAs, but it does not have to be in November.  I've not had a big snow accumulation in a long time.  My dormant snowblower could use a revival, but if that does not happen, I could hire somebody with a plow.  My gardens ought to have the seasonal vegetables uprooted in preparation for next spring.  Not much happens if I neglect that.  I've scheduled a platelet donation, one of those fulfilling tasks put on hold for two months due to illness.  Some travel:  Philadelphia and NYC.  Nothing happens if I stay home.  I'd also like to take a not too far overnight trip in December.  Could make choose a place and make reservations.  Hanukkah comes late this year but I still like to have gift selections made before Black Friday.  The Jewish community is running a course for which I have registered.  Two of the four evenings are in November.  I'm surprisingly indifferent to the curriculum.  

And then I have things that I aspire to accomplish, though nothing happens if I fall short.  I need to submit some of what I have produced for publication.  An Osher course teaches how to build a Web Site.  I always wanted one. Launch by Thanksgiving.  Home upkeep has exceeded my capacity and my wife's interest.  I convinced her we need a pro.  Now to find one.  And I've not used my fireplace in many years.  This winter.  And we won a raffle.  My wife and I need to select non-profit recipients by year's end.

While not showing up for the cardiologist appointment or my wife's concert would have some negative consequences, as would the penalties for neglecting my IRA, nearly everything else registers as elective.  Enriching to me in different ways, worth pursuing.  A month to do these things seems ample.

Voted a Week Early

My Zoom class concluded several minutes before its scheduled 2PM end.  In late October, the day's weather allowed comfort with a long sleeved shirt but no jacket.  It seemed like the right time to vote, exactly one week in advance of the formal Election Day.

My state permits early voting up to ten days in advance.  Each county has at least one location.  Mine has several, though a pittance of the number of polling sites that the state will monitor on Election Day.  Each early voting site must agree to remain open all ten days except Sunday at all specified hours.  Very few communal agencies can make that commitment.  As a result, lines become long.  The day before, I had driven past the site.  Parking in the center's lot was unrealistic.  No spaces appeared open along the sidewalks of the street on which the location stood, though I didn't sample the cross streets.  An elementary school sits next door, one that would be letting its students out while I waited my turn.   I opted to return later in the week.  This time I anticipated that I would have to park a block or two away, finding a side residential street with its own median and legal parking in front of a modest suburban house.

After locking my car, I crossed the street at an intersection with crosswalks but no traffic lights or stop sign.  Gaps in traffic and inability to drive very fast along a road that a lot of motorists occupied as they sought their chance to vote assured my safety.

No ambiguity to where this site was or what it was for.  Campaign signs for every candidate on the ballot enticed the undecided.  I was not undecided.  The community center has a small frontage.  Beyond it stands a handsome brick school, now vacant but with its sign still legible in cursive over its front door.  To the left facing that door, visitors could read the cornerstone:  MCMXXIV.  The building's centenary.  It had one fluorescent light visible in an upper-floor window.  Several windows had air conditioning units protruding to the outside.  Its purpose or its occupancy was not readily deduced by the many voters who entered the queue, which extended to the side of the building opposite the cornerstone.  It appeared about the same length as the one I had driven past the day before.  But parking space established and no competing obligations the rest of the afternoon, I affirmed that I would not be deterred from expressing my electoral preferences by any hint of impatience.

I latched myself onto the line's rear, behind a lady who kept to herself the whole time.  Two couples, likely contemporaries of mine, entered the line behind me.  Our conversations, which would last the entire time it took to reach the voting booth, began with me trying to set my smartwatch's stopwatch.  Its black screen reflected the afternoon's direct sunshine.  I could not see it, though I knew how to enter clock mode blindly.  I could not enter stopwatch mode.  Instead, I noted the time:  2:17 PM.  While I had to stroll the width of the abandoned school with other voters filling that distance, I took little assessment of who the other voters were.  I know the catchment area of that center.  Mostly suburbanites like myself and the other two couples.  The district has its demographic diversity.  The Center itself offers community based programs to a population less well-off than me.  Wage earners in retail, security, civil service, healthcare.  People of African, Hispanic, and Asian ancestry live nearby, while those with advanced university degrees who work as professionals in large corporations live a few miles away, mostly to the west.  The two couples behind me fit that description.  We quipped about kids, schools, and other places we had lived.  They were each business people who sold or merged with larger entities.  One handed over the keys to a private equity firm after having built the business over decades from start-up to 400 employees.  Not different from my tale of finding solo medical practice unable to compete with larger institutions, forcing me to seek and accept employment at one.  They wanted to be near their kids.  I wanted to be a healthy distance from mine, just as I preferred settling in a place where it was easier for me to visit my parents and in-laws than for them to visit me.  

The line plodded forward.  Periodically, an official from the state Elections Department would venture along the line, asking us if anyone needed to sit down due to frailty.  None of us took her up on the offer.  Slowly we got close enough to read the carved concrete above the front door with the center's name, then onto a small front concrete patio leading to the glass front doors with benches for those who needed rest on the side.  Not long after, our turns arrived.  The identity station had three workers for four polling booths.  The usher pointed me to a most personable official in the middle.  She took my drivers license, had me sign an electronic form on a screen, then announced my name as the next voter, as she handed me a paper with a list of contested offices that I would need to insert into a window once at the voting screen.  The booth monitor held the black privacy curtain at booth #3, which I entered. Paper inserted, error response, re-inserted, followed by a screen with each candidate for each office.  Democrats listed vertically in the left column, Republican list just to the right of that.  All offices but one were contested.  And farther to the right of the screen appeared isolated names of independent candidates or fringe parties.  Irrespective of their worthiness, their placement on the election screen disadvantaged them.  This time I voted straight party.  Touch each name in the column, watching the box with my candidates' names transform from white to traffic light green.  It questioned me a few times if I wanted to review my selections.  Confident that I voted for the best people from President at the top to County Council President at the bottom, I asked the machine to give me the confirm vote option.  Another electronic box to touch, this in a somewhat lighter shade of green.  I pressed that box with my index finger, so at least one list of hopefuls could rest assured that each of them at least appealed to somebody.

As I exited the curtain, I encountered a table with I Voted stickers.  I peeled one off, adhered it to my forehead, confirmed my watch time as 3:25PM.  The line took about an hour and ten minutes.  And my new acquaintances told me about an attractive restaurant right near my home that I had never visited.  Checked out their web site when I arrived home.  As expected, school would be letting out just as I exited the voting location.  Having parked about two blocks away, I strolled to the intersection where the school crossing guard with neon yellow vest stopped the traffic to allow me to the other side of the street.  While I did not really know the way home from that side street, I drove along its length.  It intersected with a main road.  From there I knew the best route to my house.

The designated Election Day will arrive.  My house sits about a twenty-minute walk or three-minute drive from the border with a swing state.  Media, particularly TV, originates in the megacity on that side of the border, putting me in the unwelcome advertising cross-fire.  My old HS friends reacquainted on FB some fifteen years ago.  In the end, we vote the same way, though their postings of their preferences always make me wonder whether we derived the same level of analytical skills from the classes we shared.  I've minimized my time there as a result.  And that's before we even get to paid candidate advertising, most highly dependent on innuendo of some type.  And I no longer even sign on to Twitter, as much as I have made an effort to follow mostly reputable journalists.  With my ballot submitted, I become immune to external influences.  Not the ads. Not the signs stuck into the lawn sod outside the polling place I just visited.  I'm done.  Polls with posted results showing who you favor always ahead on YouTube.  No bandwagon for me to jump aboard.  Just tune in again when the real public preferences counted and reported.

The Darndest Things

To the best of my memory, the first book I ever read cover to cover must have been Art Linkletter's Kids Say the Darndest Things.  I was a new reader, probably in second grade exiled to a school annex at the local Firehouse, as my district could not keep up with new construction that suburban migration to my district required.  TVs showed images in Black & White at the time.  Art Linkletter's House Party had considerable popularity.  It ran in the afternoons.  My mother wouldn't miss it.  When I returned home from school it would be airing.  At the end, Art Linkletter added a signature segment.  Each day he would interview children about my age selected from the local schools.  He asked each a question or two, presumably unrehearsed.  And those kids responded in the darndest ways.  He compiled favorite responses to create a short book, which I read in paperback.  YouTube has captured some of those sessions for anyone with cyberspace access who might like a chuckle, long after this classic has faced into the history of American public media.  I've never forgotten those sessions or those kids or that book.

Without knowing it, being much too young, one of our Chabad Rabbis recreated a version of this, which is why I earmark every Simchat Torah evening to attend there in lieu of my own shul which essentially has no children.  Simchat Torah and Purim evenings depend on children for the vitality of the festivities.  In the evenings, we got flags to wave and engage in minor sword fights with the sticks.  For those who returned the next morning, and a many did even when it meant missing school, hijinx continued.  Friends would bring squirt guns.  The Cantor could expect some kids to tie his shoelaces to his tzitzis.  He could be a good sport in different ways, adapting prayer melodies to what the DJ's then played on the Top 40 or the sounds that introduced our favorite TV shows.  Congregations of 70-somethings, mine and too many others across the USA, cannot generate that controlled irreverence which Simchat Torah and Purim require.  We are scripted to decorum.

Chabad seems to attract children who attend on Simchat Torah with their parents or grandparents.  A few Lubavitchers have large families, but most in attendance seem to be Jews attracted to the Chabad environment without adapting its Orthodox observance stringencies.  Each year about thirty pre-Bar Mitzvah children attend.  There seem to be some women nominally in charge of the group, maybe volunteer parents, maybe teachers in their Hebrew school.  They assemble in the sukkah for the last time, that repast between Mincha of Shemini Atzeret and the onset of Simchat Torah.  Some cake, some salads and spreads with crackers but never bread to put them on, liquid refreshments adult and pediatric.  The Rabbi has prepped the children in advance.  They will each be asked, one at a time, as they sit in chairs lining the front of the sanctuary what they will pursue in the New Year to enhance their Jewishness.  

Their two minutes in the spotlight arrives as they parade in with flags, taking their seats in roughly size order.  While adult women and men take seats on different sides of the sanctuary, the physical barrier known as a mechitza is temporarily removed, largely to enable dancing with the Torah Scrolls that will be taken out of the Ark at the front of the sanctuary when the children's interviews conclude.  

Each child has his or her prepared answer.  They will give a coin each day into a tzedakah box.  Some will recite the Modeh Ani prayer on arising or the Shema on going to bed, almost never both.  Some will begin lighting candles every Friday night with their mothers.  Some of the older ones will add the Psalm of the Day.  Other's will begin making Challah at home.

While all seem laudable, all seem to miss some of the essence of what being an optimal Jew entails.  Nobody over several years has ever committed himself to having lunch at school with the classmate who always seems to be alone.  They put coins in the tzedakah container's slot, but never consider where the accumulated money is best donated, let alone why.  Some might be old enough to have cell phones.  Nobody has ever committed to leaving it off from candle lighting Friday evening through Havdalah on Saturday night.  And if anyone ever announced that he would not join his father at the Pornhub screen until after Havdalah, the Rabbi would be able to begin his sequel to Art Linkletter's best seller of the 1950s.

Judaism has its identifiable trappings.  Observances of all types. Who has the most stringent standards for Kosher, Shabbos, Study?  Mezuzot on all doors.  Coins in the tzedakah box.  Who puts on their tefillin every day and wears tzitzis under their shirt?  Just what the kids pledged themselves to do.  But it's not only kids.  Reddit as its r/Judaism has many participants, primarily young adults of secular Jewish background, who seek to strengthen their Jewish identities.  They pose to the more experienced Jews how they should go about it.  What books might they read, what videos would enhance their quest, maybe pledging to read the weekly Torah portion in translation each week as primary text.  Should they buy tefillin, or maybe put a mezuzah on all the doors of their apartments. Those elements particular to Jews.  What too often bypasses them may be the realization that many people across the globe do things that are honorable but no longer uniquely Jewish because we have succeeded in bringing to the world standards of conduct, days of respite to our calendars, advocacy for ourselves and for others who we can help move forward.  Those are missing from the r/Judaism requests, as they were from the kids as they announced to their adult audience what they might like to pursue.

When I respond to the r/Judaism seekers, I will recommend written resources for their learning, while discouraging primary Bible readings.  From our earliest reading years, we learn from the wisdom of those who have gone before us.  We read physics texts, not the lab notebooks or research papers of the people who wrote those texts.  The seekers need to read commentary of people before them who have proficiency to share.  The primary Bible sources are not ignored but put in context.  That is Chochma, or Wisdom, one of Judaism's pillars.  We have Tzedek or Righteousness expressed in many ways.  As Kindness.  As Generosity.  As Respect for boundaries of our traditions, whether in our diets or our calendars.  So turn off the cell phones, designate an empty jar to put spare coins into so they can be donated periodically, don't demean people, be a friend when friends are scarce.  Not overtly ritual but Jewish.  The Chabad kids sort of have Kehillah or Community, the r/Judaism seekers understand they need to be part of one.  But methinks they are too quick to gravitate to a synagogue.  Jewish gatherings are sometimes social, sometimes for advocacy, sometimes for communal learning.  The r/Judaism adults have much too restricted a view, the Chabad kids have exposures directed by parents.  Chochma, Tzedek, and Kehilah have a common destination.  We recognize the intersection of these as Kedusha or Sanctity.  Making Kiddush on Friday night contributes to sanctity, but Holiness is never stand-alone.  It is mindset, communal, behavioral, sometimes avoidance of immediate druthers.  The kids at the Rabbi's House Party interview may get there.  So might the Reddit explorers.  But they will have to think about what to strive to become Jewishly in a more expansive way than I heard at Erev Simchat Torah or read on the Reddit app.