Shabbat Shalom!

1. My friend Stephanie is brilliant. She says everything I’m always trying to say. Today, we talked about how people put so much emphasis on things that can be measured. We like to define ourselves in a very “letter of the law” sense and we lose sight of what “goodness” really is. That becomes increasingly apparent when I meet so many good people that don’t have the same beliefs that I do.

2. God is merciful. Yesterday we went to the Western Wall. It’s was the second day of Rosh Hashanah and so there were thousands of people there. It was also the Sabbath, so the rules were especially foreign to us. We couldn’t bring cameras, we couldn’t write anything down, and our dress had to be very conservative. I went and touched the wall. I squeezed through the crowds to touch a wall that, truthfully, I didn’t understand was I was touching for. The woman next to me was weeping and rocking back and forth chanting scriptures for over an hour. I heard so much desperation in her cries. I realized that people everywhere are just as helpless and pathetic as I am in searching for God. To her, God was in that wall. I realized that just because this woman is a Jew doesn’t mean that she won’t know her God when she meets him. Jerusalem is awesome.

3. A discussion in my Modern Near Eastern Studies Judaism class taught by the brilliant Orthodox Jew and Boston-ite Ophir Yarden made for some exciting table talk. A classmate of mine noted that after the temple was destroyed on Mt. Moriah, the Rabbis didn’t try to rebuild the temple anywhere else. They believed they could only build on Mt. Moriah because it was chosen by God. But, the power to perform the ordinances was taken away from them and, thus, they didn’t know how they could build another temple where they could perform the same ordinances. Now, if you look at Joseph Smith, when he was forced to leave Ohio, he was able to build a temple somewhere else because he had the power and was ordained of God to perform those sacred ordinances anywhere. I mean, we can’t talk about any of this in class, but it always leads to our most interesting dinner discussions.