It's been forever and a day since I last posted! Well, at least a month. So much has been happening! Happily, distance from the events will probably curb my garrulous journaling.
The big event, the one I've been afraid to blog about lest I jinx the matter, is that my partner converted to Judaism. Calloo, callay! O frabjous day! Just about a month ago, he underwent the brit dam, the ritual drawing of blood which is the circumcised man's equivalent of the brit milah. The poor boy was terrified; he spent the day in a kind of rigor mortis. To make it worse, the other folks in our Living Judaism class who were also converting made horrible jokes (like wearing all red "so the blood doesn't show"), and yowled dramatically from the room during the process. (The room, by the way, was our rabbi's study, and I can't walk by that room any more without giggling.)
Though my partner was more anxious about the brit dam than any other aspect of the conversion, I was far more worried about the beit din and the mikvah. First of all, my partner had not yet told his parents that he was converting. (Actually, he still hasn't.) What if the beit din refused him because of this? And, as a matter of fact, they did ask him; how could they not, when his father is a Lutheran pastor? Happily, all my nagging for him to call his folks and tell them paid off, because he was able to report that he had made a good faith effort to contact them, even though he hadn't gotten through. Different time zones and all that. Then again, maybe the beit din felt as my partner feels; his conversion is a personal matter, and his parents needn't be involved in it. Hmm.
Well, the beit din gave him the go-ahead, and the following day, we made it down to the mikvah, where my sweetheart was duly dunked before his beit din. Because two of the rabbis were female, I was able to stand with them outside the door of the mikvah and listen as my partner dipped, splashed, and recited the blessings. Then we all sang "Siman Tov." I thought my face would split, I was smiling so wide.
And my partner, now Chanan, looked equally happy, even a little misty-eyed as our rabbi read him the charge.
Four other members of our class converted on the same day, so there was a lot of joy in that little waiting room. Two of the converts were a married pair who had never taken off their wedding bands (I'm not sure how they've been washing before the motzi, but there you have it), so we accompanied them to a park where they had the woman who had performed their commitment ceremony re-marry them. I think they're also planning yet another wedding, this time a Jewish one.
So, Chanan and I are now a Jewish couple. Funny - he's my first Jewish boyfriend! (And I had so enjoyed calling him my goy-friend.)
He had his first aliyah last week, and I helped make the kiddush in his honor. Honestly, that was an incredibly stressful week. I was staying at work until 6:00pm working with panicking seniors, we had the siyyum for the completion of our Living Judaism class, I was being observed by my principal for my end-of-year evaluation, and somehow I had to squeeze preparing a salad for 150 people into this mess during the specific hours I could access the shul's tiny kitchen, which had no salad spinner and was crammed full of the rest of the folks sponsoring the kiddush and the 6th grade minyan's Shabbat dinner. It's a little silly how stressed I was because, after all, I was only preparing a salad, whereas the other folks were baking and stewing and creating fruit bowls and salmon-cream cheese domes. On the other hand, it took me two and a half hours to wash all the bugs off the lettuce.
Chanan had promised to make Shabbat dinner that night so I could come home and relax...but he wasn't home when I returned to our apartment at 7:45pm, and I ended up doing all the Shabbat preparations. He also wasn't home when I lit candles at 8:30pm. And he wasn't home when I went to sleep at 9:45pm. In fact, he didn't get home until 11:00 or so because he had gone to Happy Hour with his department, and I was so sad and disappointed I had nothing to say. He, for his part, claimed to be deeply ashamed. He was under a lot of pressure and stress himself, and there had been an incident at work that had depressed him. Although I was disappointed, I wasn't nearly as angry as I had been in the past under similar circumstances. Chanan had already proven his commitment to living Jewishly by undergoing conversion, so I no longer had the anxiety on that front to feed my wrath.
In any case, the next day was a new day, a wonderful day. The day of Chanan's first aliyah. It's strange; I've heard him sing as he plays the guitar, but it wasn't until he was upon the bimah singing the blessings that I realized how beautiful his voice truly is. I wasn't surprised when a number of people assaulted him and asked when he was going to learn to leyn. There was a lot of gleeful beaming all around, and a lot of hugs.
Somewhere in between this mess, I leyned for the fifth time, and I was exceedingly anxious after my last two flubs on the bimah. Stomach churning, heart pounding, I made way up to the bimah for the first reading. Surprise, surprise: the scroll wasn't rolled to the right place. Believe you me, I checked and triple checked. Then I backed away and let the gabbais sort it out. It took a good five minutes of muttering and rolling and unrolling. And then it was fine, and I read.
When I bought my Artscroll tikkun, my mentor predicted that I would love it so much that I would feel let down by our Torah scroll. I had no idea what she meant; I've always loved our scroll. However, this time, I knew exactly what she meant. I'd always had shorter portions, five or six lines or less. This time, I had a portion with about ten lines, and I quickly realized that when there's more text, the scribe sometimes has to fudge a bit to squeeze everything into the proper place. As a result, the letters shrank and words almost ran together as I moved down the column, and my hand began shaking violently as I realized that if I lost my place or forgot a word, I would have no idea where I was or what I was reading. But I made it through, no mistakes. And I made my mentor promise me not to give me the first reading any more. (I've had the first reading the last three times!) And, I can take a breather until the fall. When I start teaching Sunday school. I am SO not going to think about *that* right now!