This morning I finished the largest piece of written work I have ever done. I may have once or twice written pieces of software of similar length, but this paper just kept growing. I’m not certain it’s my best piece of literary work, and I keep findingpoints where I forgot to edit, so there might be some more. Anyway, if you’re bored and feel like looking at my 24,000 word paper on the history of Jewish interpretation of Psalms 62:12, you’re welcome to. Printed it looks more like a book than an essay. I’ve decided I’ll start putting up some of my essays for university courses online in general. So feel free to check them out, even though, again, I don’t promise an exciting read.

So now I have a take-home exam to do, and a linguistics exam tomorrow… Then a whole pile of errands, and one evening I’ll suddenly find myself in an airport, leaving the city I’ve called home for eight months. Weird.

On Tuesday evening, I was expecting a phone-call from my family. My mum had called from Sydney on Saturday night to tell me that my 89-year-old grandfather (known to us all as Poppy) had been sent to hospital on Friday evening, with internal bleeding. The family said his condition wasn’t too good. So I spent the last two days of the holiday thinking and worrying on occasion.

So when the holiday ended on Tuesday night, I was possibly expecting bad news. There was a message on my phone that someone had left me voicemail around 5:30, but I was at a Mimouna and intended to enjoy myself, so I didn’t want to check it until I got home.

Then a short while later I received a call from the number of my brother, Simon. I snuck into a small room and answered the phone. Simon didn’t mention Poppy at first. Instead he told me he had asked his girlfriend to marry him.

This came as a bit of a shock. He had indicated that he thought she was something special. But I hadn’t even spoken to her, or met her… So it felt a little strange to be on this side of the world (as it did with mum’s call on Saturday).

Still, most of my trauma came because this wasn’t the news I was expecting. Poppy, it seems, was looking a little better than forecast, with the help of four doses of blood. Last I heard he is still in hospital and doing okay.

But a big mazal tov to Simon and Shimrit. I’m glad he has found his happiness. And I’m sure when I meet her in May, I’ll be thrilled to welcome her into the family.

PS: “snuck” isn’t in the spellchecker I use. Perhaps in the next edition?
PPS: I didn’t used to use a spellchecker. But this script was too attractive considering the number of errors I’ve made in previous blogs…

Suddenly in these last few days, University administration has decided the chapel in the McGill “Birks” Religious Studies building no longer exists. Signs that once indicated its presence are now gone. The room that the rest of the building is centred around no longer has any official purpose or title.

(It seems Hillel Montreal has also removed its Chapel sign. A plaque proudly reading “CHAPEL” remains lying around the room, presumably from before the recent renovations here. But its removal “chapel” was probably a rejection of terminology and not an issue of secularisation. The one currently labelling the room says “Beit Midrash” instead, which possibly implies being more Orthodox, but maybe less religious, changing focus from worship to text.)

Québec is not known for being the most tolerant place for outsiders. Its language laws have threatened the removal of historical signage, and cause it to have PFK stores while France does not dispute the name “KFC”. In our case it seems that secularism, or at least some form of xenophobia is intended to keep the Québécois with what is familiar to them.

And yet Montréal is still built around its famous cathedrals, and most of its street names that don’t begin with “Saint” begin “Sainte”. As my professor B. Barry Levy argues, if we want to make the city secular, we not only have to rename all the streets, but we have to stop celebrating Christmas and Easter as public holidays… He would rather putting the Christ back into Christmas and allowing religious expression in a more pluralist society. Despite being Dean of the aforementioned Religious Faculty, he only found out about the changes in signage after returning from two days off for Pesach, and considers it akin to Egyptian pharaohs each removing the names of their predecessors, as if they had never ruled.

Sydney had its share of the religious accommodation issue in 2003 when it was suggested that the pedestrian traffic lights be automatic (and not button-triggered) on Sabbaths, in certain areas with religious Jewish populations (Bondi Rd). Despite the fact that a lot of the world’s urban areas run on automatic pedestrian lights, for some reason a lot of the local community were offended by the thought of accommodating to the Orthodox Jewish community’s (albeit strange-seeming) needs for safety. Yes, it would cost some Council money, but they make up a significant portion of the municipal population, and it detracts for nobody as far as I can tell. It seems that last December the Council acceded to the requests (although using some motion sensors) but according to the over-100 comments on that article, it was met with largely ignorant and intolerant obstinacy—at least by online Telegraph readers. (“Once again it shows that ordinary people are left to the pandering of a minority group.” says Fred Lavender; “If certain people consider pushing a button to be work then they don’t belong in our society and I don’t see why we need to accede to these so called religious laws. It seems to be an all male agenda. Why am I not surprised.” remarks Colleen Appleton; Leigh Roberts: “What an absolute joke. Australia used to be a place where people wanted to fit in, now its just about complaining about anything and everything that dosen’t suit.” They go on and on and on.) Even if I might agree that there are better places to spend the money, our society spends similar money on erecting Christmas decorations, and certainly more on NYE fireworks.

The seventh definition of “of” given by Merriam-Webster is:

used as a function word to indicate something from which a person or thing is delivered eased of her pain or with respect to which someone or something is made destitute robbed of all their belongings“

This may help understand the outlook for “freedom of religion” in an increasingly secular world…

This is not always an advantage. Such as today when I needed to go to the toilet but my reading material (which I leave beside it) had disappeared. I went to ask George about it, but he only knew of a comic book and a magazine that were there but he had moved. It seems the importants at Hillel had asked him to clean the area as we are having a few guests staying with us for the weekend.

Frustratingly, I still can’t find what I’d left there; which had stayed there without being disturbed for a couple of weeks. More annoyingly, it’s not something I can easily reproduce: It was a typewritten document of family history translated from a text written in German by a cousin Friederich Nothmann in the late 1930s. The family genealogist in Thornhill, Ontario, had offered to send copies to members of the family, and I received mine with $2.50 in stamps a few weeks ago. Thankfully, others have received copies in Australia, so I might be able to copy theirs when I get back.

In the meantime I’m upset about someone having decided what was mess in an apartment that wasn’t theirs. But maybe that’s what you get for having someone else clean it.

(It reminds me too of the time on Machon when the cleaners managed to send a friendly splash of bleach-based cleaner onto my t-shirt, leaving a permanent pink stain on it…)

And so, returning from a megillah reading at the Ghetto Shul (tacked on to the end of Shabbat), I arrived to a crowd of fancy-dressed people waiting for someone to read for them at Hillel. I realised that, having still not come up with a costume, I had to do something creative and quickly. So I took off my shirt and put it on back to front, and attached to it my polka-dotted blue bowtie (my always handy, most versatile fancy-dress outfit), put on my coat back-to-front, and tried walking around with my hood on… When I eventually saw how I looked, it was a pretty strange outfit, but some people appreciated it.

Within the Orthodox community there were two parties within 15 minutes walk of each other downtown: one run by the Ghetto Shul (the downtown student community), and the other by the Lighthouse/Tishters (the Montreal Cote-St-Luc student community); both promised a great time, live music and wacky costumes; the first cost $2, the other $10, so the choice was easy. And if I still felt like partying once the Ghetto Shul event had ended, I could always head to the other.

Before I got there, though, I realised that my costume would be vastly improved by having a face on the back of my head to go with the inverted shirt, but no glasses I had found would stay on. I did know, though, that there were some elastic-tied masks lying around at the Ghetto Shul, so I went there to find one, dropped in on Naomi at the library (preparing frantically for a chemistry midterm) before going up to Gerts, the on-campus bar. There, Maya took my $2 (with my back to her), and I took her photo, before going into the party.

Some of the costumes around me were neat, but little came close to Leibish and Dena’s. Both had thrown on a bit of a punk edge, Leibish covered in chains, Dena in big baggy pants. Her hair was long and streaked in copper; his was shaven to a bright blonde mohawk.

I only later got to check (by running my hand over it) that Leibish’s haircut was for real, as he was on stage with his sax when I got there. It was quite a sax-full evening: he, Jeff and Adam R each had theirs and they jammed along. At different times in the night we also had drum, bass-guitar, Blander on electric, Jordan on harmonica… And producing some great, fun music. For a short while Rabbi Eliyon Shemesh (a scarecrow for the night) visited with his guitar and a handful of Carlebach tunes.

The party was lots of fun, and there were enough people there and enough entertainment for me to not have to head for another, and so only spend $2 for entry and $3 on sharing a “pitcher” of beer. A little shmoozing, dancing, eating, drinking, photographing and the bar was ready to close up. Avraham made his way from Outremont in clown’s outfit and with unicycle under-foot soon before they did.

In the morning, there was yet another megillah reading called for 10:30 (read by Leibish) followed by brunch. In addition, I had been invited by Sigal a few weeks back to play Mordecai in a Purim spiel. She wrote a humorous script with a feminist approach that has been common recently: to make the despised queen Vashti the story’s hero, and Haman a womanising creep. And so, Vashti’s Revenge—featuring Allison as Vashti, Rebecca as Eshter, Adam as the king, Amanda as a concubine, Josh as Haman, Arié as the king’s officer—rehearsed a total of three times before showdown on Sunday. I added a couple of musical pieces to the beginning and end to put the play into the mood. (I also wanted Haman to sing Throw the Jews Down the Well but that was rejected.)

So, after everyone had grabbed their bagels, and fruit, and juice, and hamentaschen, we had everyone settle down in their megillah-listening seats, and took our positions backstage. Allison entered and introduced Megillat Vashti, before the whole cast came on to do the can-can while singing Liza Minelli’s Shushan, Shushan. My character was meant to be an absent-minded, hunch-backed, rabbinic-looking Jew who was always too busy having talmudic arguments with himself to notice anything much else around him, and whose arthritis wouldn’t permit him to bow down to Haman. Vashti spends most of the play pretending to be a man and secretly ruling the empire through Esther; Haman, the kingdom’s head sleaze, tries to come onto Esther when Achashverosh enters and spills the drinks on him. At the end, it is victory for Vashti and Esther, and so we end the play with a song. It even seems people in the audience could understand the words we were singing; this was evident from the reaction on Becca’s face when we sang the second line of the chorus (to Lifehouse’s Hanging by a Moment):

They tried to take all Persia from the crown
But now they’re strangled purple, green and brown.
They’re flailing here until we take them down,
They’re hanging by a rope here with you.

I had been afraid the play wasn’t going to turn out, but I think in the end we carried it off well, and gave the audience a great time. It was good fun to play in, too.

Even after everyone had had their fill, the leftovers were still numerous. I shlepped piles of bagels up to our kitchen, along with some bottles of juice. It seems I missed out on bringing up hamentaschen or cake, and there wouldn’t be enough people at home to get cut fruit. But there was plenty for the taking.

By the time I had gathered all that, and we had done mincha, it was almost time to do my only non-Purim thing for the day: New Earth Voices (a choir I’m in) was having an extraordinary rehearsal at 2pm. The Ghetto Shul’s Purim Extravaganza was announced for 3pm, with a megillah reading then, and I would only be stopping my singing at 4:30. Still, when I got there, the seudah (meal) hadn’t started, and people were waiting outside while the tables were being set up.

When I eventually made it inside, the whole room was decorated very colourfully and very sweetly. The tables (even the walls and ceilings) were covered with all kinds of sweet things: chocolate coins, jelly-beans, lollipops turned into crepe-paper flowers, candy-canes, shot glasses waiting for vodka… The colourful and sweet theme continued into the meal, where the corn salad was sickly sweet, and the humus had been dyed pink. I have to say I don’t find these colourings particularly appealing. I never got used to the green, yellow or purple tomato sauce I met in Israel. While others were purple and pink, my table’s bottle of water was coloured yellow and looked like oil, so most people instinctively kept away from it.

We heard a saxaphone duet—Leibish on alto and Adam R on soprano—and Leibish led an entertaining Purim quiz whose answerers were awarded shots of an expensive bottle of donated whisky. Two more prizes in large bags were available, and I answered the question just a moment after Rachel got in. But she didn’t want the prize, so she eventually managed to push it onto me and I walked away with a Smores kit.

By dessert, for whatever reason, most people had left. Dessert, though, didn’t really have a different sugar content to the rest of the meal, only in different forms: M&Ms, ice-cream and the like. A few of us left, now on a Purim/sugar high, realised we still needed to bentch (say grace after the meal), and so searched for a fun tune to shir hamaalot. We sang it to Yellow Submarine, and then had a very long and elaborate and hugely enjoyable rendition of the prayer.

Once again, I was one of the last left around, and so had pillaging rights, and liberated a bag of M&Ms, as well as all the things I had been given as mishloach manot, the Smores kit, and a few things off the tables and walls. I felt it ironic that the Megillah feels the need to specify that although the king granted the Jews to take the spoils of their attack (8:11), it also insists that when the event came, they did not (9:10, 16). Well, I did. Yum.

They are finally predicting highs of 9 degrees by the end of the week…

Update: they bureau changed its mind: the best we’ve got now till Sunday is 1 degree.

This was redeemed only a little by McGill’s library going back to their Wednesday night practice of leaving recycling bins full of books outside in the cool air, waiting for people to come and rifle through them for anything of use.

Little pamphlets only eighty pages long, paperbacks, hardcovers thin and thick. Most are in English; some in French; others on occasion in assorted languages, such as Hebrew: This evening, David Zvi came and offered me a book of Genesis in Hebrew with some commentaries. He told me the bins have been back out there for two weeks.

So I went down on my way from the library and took my turn at them. Five large bins of books. Many are cheap novels; some are classics that everyone already has; others are large textbooks and pamphlets on various topics; household encyclopedias; childrens’ colouring books and stories; a lot of books on economics (and how to succeed) from various ages; psychology is always popular, maybe because anything ten years old is outdated; others on sex and anything taboo.

And occasionally there’s something worth taking, or just amusing.

The other guy searching with me at first (before others joined) managed to find a free Agatha Christie novel, and soon a great Christmas/birthday present: “How to manage a urinary tract infection.”

I’m not sure how useful my takings are, but there’s no harm in having them, and no guilt in later throwing them away. My first find (and a good one) was a Pocket Books French/English dictionary, which may come in handy alongside the French text book I picked up from a second-hand shop in Boston, in these last few weeks of chance to learn the language. My second was a small pamphlet on “The Christian Mysteries: Prayer and Sacrement,” which might come in handy when I finish using my family’s history as toilet reading material. Then there was “How to Satisfy a Man Every Time and have him beg for more!” which falls under the same category as managing urinary tract infections (good for giving). As I was leaving, a fellow digger called out for anyone interested in learning Ancient Greek and so I picked up an introductory text. And when I came back later, I acquired Strunk and White’s style guide to American English (3rd ed., 1979).

All this begs to ask where all these hundreds upon hundreds of books come from. Well, they appear weekly outside the main library, which suggests that they were once inside. But they bear no mark of cataloguing. So the library was given them but didn’t want them in their collection. Which is fair enough: few of the books would fit well in a research library; those that do might be obsolete, others already in the collection. Most of the books seem to have come from household libraries, but wouldn’t most households try profiting by selling to a second-hand bookshop? Maybe these are even the books the bookshops rejected! But most people don’t ask. Gleefully, they just reach in and take.

And so it is on Wednesday nights that those who know, or those who are curious enough to approach, take no caution in throwing their arms into big blue bins, upturning the piles of books and scrap paper and magazines. Pulling them out, checking their spines, throwing them back. Believing that somewhere in there will be a shining gem. No one asks with any care where they came from, or who is throwing all these out, they just come with the faith that maybe this week, just maybe, the bins will contain the book for them.

These might not amount to Simon’s finds from the Fisher Undergratuate Library. But at least, when it’s warm enough, they’re back every week!

So while I had nearly forgotten to pack my passport, what I had really forgotten was that I didn’t have it at all: I had sent it to the Canadian Embassy in NYC a couple of weeks ago with my Study Permit application (I didn’t need one for a single semester here, but I did for two).

As a result, I proceeded to spend a while stressing, talking to Naomi who looked for embassy and border phone numbers, but because I was only packing at the last minute as I tend to do, most hotlines weren’t open late enough. I called one that was, for Canadian citizens in emergencies abroad, and thankfully they didn’t throw me off the line for (1) not being Canadian (2) not being abroad (3) having a loose definition of emergency. But most of what they told me involved recommending against trying to cross the border without my passport/visa… I had thought it might be more stressful than worthwhile anyway.

It’s not quite in my mentality yet that I need a passport to get to somewhere that I can reach by a 6 hour bus ride. You simply can’t do that in Australia. Anywhere in Australia. So it completely slipped my mind.

Well Boston’s off the books then. It had sounded like a nice trip (and great value: CA$100 with travel and entertainment included), with a great bunch of people.

So while I considered paying my $100 elsewhere for a ride to Toronto and back (it’s our mid-semester break), a main motivation of going that way would be to see Niagara, in which case I might want to plan ahead to make sure I have a friend to come with me.

So I guess it’s another shabbat in Montreal. I don’t think it’ll be so bad. =) I think I’ve found somewhere interesting for dinner…

Wow. It’s a little different here from what I’m used to back home. In montreal, I’ve never entered a class to find it the sujbect of a recent “flyer drop”. No one’s even stood at the entrance of the room or building handing out their rhetoric. I’ve not experienced a Canadian “lecture bash”; not seen people bludging their classes to wear bright t-shirts and huddle in groups around footpath tables or otherwise flying from poster-board to poster-board with staple-gun and roll of bright mass-copied paper in hand. People usually wear just clothes, not stickers and badges. And there are no rabid extremist politicians calling out against the government (or any cause) as you journey on by them on the street.

The best people have here to promote their cause seems to be a handful of poster-boards around the place, samosa and bake sales in the foyers of Leacock or Redpath, the usual annoying flyer distributions (usually for clubs on Friday nights) by people on either side of the narrow Milton Gate exit, e-mailing lists, and (of course) Facebook groups.

I mean, it’s understandable that they don’t rally loudly for hours on the campus’s equivalent of USyd’s Front Lawn. After all, it is covered in snow and so not so lawny; and unless they were all rallying hard, the -10 degree weather would eventually be unbearable, at least for some. Besides, they don’t seem to have yet conceptualised the free sausage sizzle around here.

But, seriously, the main physical form of advertisement coming up to today’s event was a handful of Letter-sized, glossy, bright green posters. Much more cheery than the startling red that all year long emblazons Sydney Uni’s walkways, at least for the clubs that can afford colour printing.

As the time came around, I’d still not heard anyone mention the upcoming rally in person—only emails from SSMU = the Union—and my lecture theatre at 1:30 was as full as usual.

Sorry James J.: not the campus for you, I guess.

PS: Who says post-secondary? Doesn’t tertiary follow primary and secondary?
PPS: Then again, who says “gay” and means “jolly”? Clearly I do.

Looking at the box, it read “3460 Peel St, apt 9**” which explained the problem: we reside at 3460 of the next street along. The delivery-person had obviously been a little confused. Thankfully there was also a phone number on the side of the box. I took Emmanuel downstairs to the phone, where, if the person answered “hello” I would speak, and if “Allô”, Emmanuel would take the handset.

A girl answered with English, and I explained that we’d received her groceries. She asked which apartment we were in, but I told her we were on another street. She—a little worried—said she didn’t have a car, took my number and proceeded to call the supermarket (ir)responsible.

We found out that Jon had let the delivery guy in. He figured that the delivery must, for some reason, be for us, and had led the boxes to the kitchen table. Only once the guy was gone did he see the wrong address, but decided not to do anything about it.

Soon enough the delivery guy visited again and redeemed the goods. Iona had the final say on the event (except for the girl who called to thank me): Following up on recent conversation on how messy we keep our kitchen, and how much we rely on George the Hillel caretaker to clean up after us, she pointed at the black liquid mess left on the table and, returning to her room, exclaimed, “poor George!”