Have had a full weekend already and it isn't even finished yet. Friday night I went to the Simchat Torah service with my roommate. This is the holiday that ends Sukkot and celebrates starting over in the Torah readings, from the end of Deuteronomy back to the beginning of Genesis. For this service the big ritual is to carry all the Torah scrolls in the house around the sanctuary seven times, singing a new song each time and learning a new lesson about the Torah. I'm told that the Hasidic Jews make a dance out of this process, which would be fun to see; but it was fun even in a Reform temple, because the kids got involved. For Sukkot the children had made Israeli flags on dowel sticks, and they were given these to wave around while the adults paraded around with the scrolls. (I got an Israeli flag too, but did not circle the temple.) By the end of the first hakafah, everybody was talking so loud you could hardly hear the guitar player singing the song. The rabbi was being very patient as she read the new lesson over the din (the paper flags were making the most noise, the adults the next most, and then the kids). Somewhere around the second or third hakafah, some kid got the idea of pulling the fire alarm out in the hall, which he did. The procession bravely continued while one of the adults went to disarm it, and the din increased. By the final hakafah I was saying in a low shout to my roommate, "For a holiday that celebrates the Law, this is the most lawless service I've ever seen!"

I've visited Temple Israel enough times that I can say it isn't like that the rest of the year; it's usually pretty sedate and informally decorous.

Then Saturday morning we got up early to go to the campaign headquarters to volunteer to drop Jean Carnahan literature at designated addresses on precinct maps. This is the second time I've done this, and it teaches you something about the process of getting the word out about a candidate. Anytime I've gotten literature, even about the candidate I'm voting for, I get irritated because I've pretty much made up my mind already. But how are the campaigns to know that? And what other ways do they have of telling the public about their candidate that aren't equally annoying? But a lot of the people who were actually at their doors were very gracious about receiving the broadsheets. "Well, I'm on her side," said one older woman as I poked the literature through the cracked-open screen door over a yapping dog. I'm thinking about this weirdness of American election processes, but I've come to no conclusions as yet. I've always been registered Independent, but have never voted for a Democrat yet...this might be the year, now that I've established that it isn't against my religion to vote Democratic. Anyway, I'm rather bewildered that my roommate has inveigled me into actually campaigning for Democrats...but it's actually been fun.

Then we went to the play at Drury -- Picasso at the Lapin Agile by Steve Martin. One of Jessica's students is playing the title role. The play was very good, and quite amusing. Jessica had promised her two theatre students that she would tape the West Wing premiere for them, and it ended up that the whole cast was dying for a tape of the West Wing premiere, including Dr. Schraft, the director. So she's taping next week's episode for them also, and will give it to them to circulate amongst themselves. If next week is anything like the premiere, it would be entirely worth the wait.

I wonder what the next few hours will bring.