HAPPY BELATED CANADA DAY!
בס"ד
6 Tamuz
Or Dominion Day, as I grew up calling it. July 1st only became Canada Day after we patriated our constitution (from England, of course) in 1982. That was the first time I got to see HRH* the Queen & Prince Philip in person! I'd had an opportunity when I was 3, but apparently, so the family legend goes, I decided I had to go to the bathroom just before the Royal motorcade drove by. My Mum (who is getting better, btw) enlisted my elder sister to take me, so she, too, missed seeing HRM**.
Sorry, Tam :)
Anyway, a hat tip to Peter over at Another Country for sending this tidbit to me...& PLEASE read the Stephen Lewis article he links to. Stephen Lewis has got to be one of the greatest & most compassionate humanitarian workers on the planet today (& a Canadian Jew), so check out his Foundation as well, if you would.
TAPESTRY:
Harry Schachter needed a pair of tefillin. They're the small black boxes made of leather and containing a tiny Torah scroll that Jewish worshippers strap on during morning services. So Harry asked his father if the ones he remembered using as a teenager were still around. They were - but things didn't work out quite the way Harry expected. Along the way, Harry learned a lot about tefillin, about Judaism and about love between the generations stretching all the way back to Russia. Hear his story on Tapestry, Sunday afternoon right after the 2 p.m. news (2:30 NT, 4 MT, 3 PT) on CBC Radio One.
You can click on the program here, if you like, & you can see actual pictures of Harry's great-grandfather's tefillin here.
Have a beautiful long weekend, y'all, & think about how we can make our countries better, because that's the best use of nationalism.
* HRH - Her Royal Highness
** HRM - Her Royal Majesty
[Addendum: my fave quote/idea from the first half of the Tapestry program:
"Pilgrimage is the act of putting your body into your faith."
Ameyn!]
Technorati tags: religion, religion and philosophy, Judaism, Jew, Jews, Jewish, Torah, Canada, Canadian, tefillin, nationalism, CBC, Stephen Lewis, journal, weblog, blog, diary, soferet, sofrut, safrut, scribe, art, thoughts, stam, feminism, ritual, women, woman, life, sofer, Technorati.
posted by Soferet | 12:29:00 p.m.
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4 Comments:
Happy Canada Day to you too Avielah! I might have said before that if I wasn't an expatriate Brit in Israel who misses California, I would love to have been Canadian :)
בס"ד
Ha! that's beautiful, Manna Eater :)
Vancouver could be billed as a "British version of California", but I prefer to refer to it as Lotus Land :)
& you're welcome to visit anytime...I'm sure you'd fit in.
While we're at it, let's not forget Stephen Lewis's wife, Michele Landsberg, wonderful writer, and one of the powerful women on Half the Kingdom.
BTW, I have changed my other blog, The Walking Man, to The Pilgrim, on reflection from the Lucinda Vardy piece.
בס"ד
Really? Wow...you know, I don't check out "your other blog" near enough.
Yeah, the Lucinda Vardy program was fantastic - she inspired me to go out & garden. So often I get tied up in my head (as scribes do) & her focus on place & pilgrimage was truly refreshing. Partly because she didn't pretend to raise the sanctity up of a location - she valued it for what it was & that was enough. There was also a distinct lack of fetishism, which you tend to see in pilgrimage. So good on her.
Yes, Michele Lansberg is yet another working for peace & pursuing justice. We're lucky to have her.
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