...because mine is so hidden! But at least I can still log on to check out your nominees. Maybe I'll even forward a couple to you that I find reprehensible. Ooo, that might be a bad precedent to set. Hmm.

...but the best I could do was fund my 18-yr-old's attendance at Limmud, and it's not my fault that's he not female!

The program shows options for Shacharit, so maybe some younger women were at the alternative service. (I doubt many were hiding behind the mechitsah in the other room.) On the other hand, how did you get up that early with the time zone change?

Has the situation at Limmud improved after more people showed up later on Friday?

Great idea, especially since I'm immune due to being unsubscribed!

As an editor, I really appreciate your comment about tpyos and mispelings and such in JDate profiles. But really, it's just a convenient way for the losers to tag themselves.

As I type this on Friday, I see that your featured profile still has misspellings. I wonder if he even knows why his profile is suddenly getting so many views?

Wait, is this lashon harah? The recent Gawker-Facebook incident clearly is....

The NYT article would have you think this siddur is looming in the future, but lots of congregations been using drafts of this for a year or more, so it's not exactly a mysterious entity. At least one of the Reform congregations in Nashville should be using it, so you could have a look. Temple Emanu-El in Dallas has a Classical Reform reputation, but I was there last month and they used Mishkan T'filah and did silent standing Amidah, so all this is becoming rather mainstream.

A big advantage over GOP/Big Blue/Sharei T'filah (NYT would have you think giving the Reform siddur a name in Hebrew was an innovation) is that you can do an entirely-Hebrew service out of Mishkan T'filah.

There are a couple of odd changes in the Hebrew, like one spot that refers to God as a Shomer of something instead of as a Melech of whatever, but you can kinda skip over that--in fact, it's hard not to go on saying whatever you're used to saying. Translating is interpreting, but changing the Hebrew like that is jarring.

On the other hand, I do like Avot v'Imahot and other minor additions to the Hebrew to make it Matriarch-inclusive, and I also appreciate the gender-neutral translations.

And that's why there are different movements, different congregations, different siddurim, different service leaders, etc. It's good that we can all find somewhere to feel at home.

The art that accompanied 'Orthodox Paradox' adds to the implication of tampering with a photo. It plainly shows an outline of a person missing from a scene. It's not a party scene (it shows men with books, fringes, tefillin, etc.), and it's a piece of art (by R. Kikuo Johnson), but a man is shown as a negative outline: no color, no detail, as though someone had been cut from the colorful scene with scissors.

Surely this was commissioned to accompany the piece, and it would be most interesting to see what was asked for.

Now that we see the actual photos from the party, it's plain to me that choosing a photo that doesn't show everyone present is a much less exclusionary act than the implied Photoshop session. My sincere apologies to his classmates, who I had accused of enjoying his company but being unwilling to admit it publicly. I'm so very sorry to have been insufficiently skeptical.

I'd been active in the Jewish community for long enough that people were surprised when I stood up before the congregation and made it official, but I had felt like being an atheist and being a Jew were incompatible for a long time. Learning to set aside the dominant culture's childish Anthropomorphic Omniscient Voyeur metaphors for God and coming up with meaningful ways to comprehend the incomprehensibility were necessary before I could accept Judaism--and far more difficult than internalizing the need to pick up a hallah on Fridays.

So although I'm a rather observant member of my community, I'd still call myself an atheist: not in an anti-theist believe/deny way, but in an a-theist relevant/irrelevant way. Any talk about God is too big and too small simultaneously, and I'm very wary of people who speak confidently about their closeness to God or their knowledge of God's will. God doesn't enter into my life in that way, and if others are experiencing that, well, that's fine, but leave me out of it.

But I'm also thrilled that my son the liturgist has just asked me to copy-edit his siddur.

I spend all day every day in front of this thing for work and for community, but on Shabbat, I pretend like it doesn't even exist. It's amazingly restorative.

Uh, no, I think not! The recent DirecTV ads featuring that trivia must be aimed squarely at people who watch too much TV, not people old enough to remember DeLoreans as I'd previously thought.

That aspect of the dinner conversation was clearly constructed to show that the guys are off in watching-lots-of-cable-TV land, not that the women are airheads.

My previous comment has a similarly crafted pop culture reference that those guys would have gotten immediately. How many of you even noticed it?