Give ear, O ye heavens, and I will speak; and hear, O earth, the words of my mouth.
My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distil as the dew, as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as the showers upon the grass:
Because I will proclaim the name of the LORD: ascribe ye greatness unto our God.
He is the Rock, his work is perfect: for all his ways are judgment: a God of truth and without iniquity, just and right is he.
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That's the Torah portion from the Bat Mitzvah we attended on Saturday night. This will be a rushed entry as it's after midnight and I've only just finished getting the photos off my SD cards from there and from the harvest festival at the Agricultural History Farm Park in Gaithersburg, where we saw pigs, goats, sheep, a calf, a donkey, and demonstrations of sheepdog shepherding, plowing for potatoes, and scarecrow-making, plus bluegrass music and Adam finding his way through a corn maze.
The Bat Mitzvah was the daughter of an old friend, someone I haven't seen much recently but our older sons are almost exactly the same age and she was one of my first new friends when I moved back to the Washington area with a baby after living in Chicago for grad school. The service was lovely -- I like the Havdalah service in general, and after the chaos of Rosh Hashanah, it was very relaxing, much more conducive to meditation than the High Holy Day lunacy. I had a nostalgic moment when one of the grandfathers started reading with Ashkenazi pronunciation -- a lot of letters that have T sounds in Sephardic Hebrew, which is standard in Hebrew schools these days, have S sounds in Ashkenazi pronunciation, which is how my grandparents always did the major prayers and mourner's kaddish.
At the reception, which was held at an Italian restaurant, I saw a lot of people I used to see quite a bit when our children were young, but haven't kept up with recently, so that was very nice, and I met a woman who apparently graduated from high school with me but neither of us remembered ever meeting the other in school. The food was fantastic -- fruit and cheese on a table plus hot appetizers circulating, then caesar salad, then salmon with potatoes and vegetables, then chocolate cake and raspberry sorbet with ice cream -- and the kids had a good time despite knowing very few others, since they don't go to school with the Bat Mitzvah girl...Daniel talked the ear off a boy he's known since he was in preschool, Adam and some other boys inhaled helium from the balloons and talked funny.
Maryland lost, woe, and Michigan lost, heh, and Penn won, yay, and that's about all I picked up while reading today's scores off my mobile browser to my father on the way home. On Sunday, Adam is supposed to watch part of the Redskins game for P.E. homework, so I guess we will be doing that for part of the afternoon!
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