I got an early birthday present today in the form of a new Yamaha DGX-640 “Portable Grand” keyboard.

Photo by Hannah Stober

There are a couple reasons I chose this model. I wanted something that would get played and sound good. The nice thing about a digital piano like this is that it’s designed to imitate a full-sized Yamaha grand piano that never goes out of tune. Of course it doesn’t sound or feel exactly the same, but neither does an older upright piano that doesn’t stay in tune and can’t be moved.

Secondly, I really just wanted a keyboard! I am a little ashamed to say this as there seems to be this idea that children should be classically trained on an acoustic piano, but if sometimes I could play jazz on a jazz organ, rock music on a vintage synthesizer, or even Bach on a church organ, that just means we’d play it more and have more fun and that’s what it all about. There were some models (YDP-181) that imitated an acoustic a little better in the same price range (but with less features), and professionally-oriented models (CP-5) that did everything better for a lot more money and a higher learning curve (maybe if I get better, someday…).

After all, while my daughter getting old enough for piano lessons was a justification, the reason we got this was because I wanted it! I took piano lessons from 1st or 2nd through 9th grade and kept practicing throughout high school, and only gave it up when I couldn’t take the piano with me on the plane to college. So, I’ve been wanting to get back to it for a while. And while there is a single button to get back to Grand Piano mode if she needs that to practice, if playing in a different voice gets her to practice more, is that wrong?

Maybe I’ll post some YouTube video but first I need to practice!

I feel there is a very different design ethic now that I have the GM car.

I saw that Chevrolet is doing a program to sponsor training for first responders to learn how to extricate people from their upcoming electric car with the Jaws of Life, etc.

There are two ways to look at it. Toyota finds ways to be Lean about everything, and it makes a lot of money, and makes GM look old and stupid.

On the other hand, GM over-engineers things. And so the Volt comes out years behind the Prius, for maybe more money. But for all that extra time they will actually have a car that is a lot more efficient. They are probably losing money because they do things like training for rescue personnel that might not contribute to the bottom line (but if you’re the one in a wreck, it’s good they did)!

Similarly, with our car, the way the radio is all integrated with everything from the driver’s side door to the OnStar system, it’s like – this is not the simplest, leanest way to do it. It has to be more complex and require exponentially more engineering to get right. But the end result is a car that might successfully argue against the “KISS” (keep it simple, stupid) principle. Which is really interesting to me, since I engineer complicated things professionally.

So, take an activity—say, cooking, which may be one of the most natural, human things we can do for one another—and break it up into a thousand pieces and you’ll find yourself with a dreary workforce and inferior biscuits. That we ever got to this point, when it is so clearly a source of despair, is astonishing.

via Biscuit making / from a working library, via Ned Batchelder: Fragmented biscuit making.

It remains a mystery why, in some people, the immune system responds like a fly swatter to a food allergen while in others, the cavalry is summoned, cannons blasting.

via When food hurts – The Boston Globe.

The “fly swatter” resonates with me. It is indeed a confusing mystery as to whether some itch or tingle is an allergy, something else (which still wouldn’t explain the positive allergy tests), or just me being overly sensitive. Or God forbid, a warning of a worse reaction, which I’ve never had but is in my family history. It’s just good to see the popular media acknowledge this. Everything you find online (including from the food-allergy advocacy groups, unfortunately) tends be along the lines of “kids can die from food allergies; and if it doesn’t kill you, you’re just making it up.”

My only issue that this doesn’t cover is trying to keep kosher but ordering the steak because who knows what combination of nuts and seeds the veggie burger will be fortified with (and I don’t really want to go into it all with the server).

Well, not my job, but the people on the front lines of my organization:

Dear Colleagues,

As many of you know, film crews from ABC News spent several months at the MGH last year documenting the experiences and perspectives of staff, patients and families. By the time the crews finished filming in May 2009, they had captured more than 2,500 hours of footage, showcasing the poignant stories that unfold inside our hospital walls each day.

After a year of cutting, editing, polishing and refining, the result is “Boston Med,” an eight-part series that will air this summer, beginning Thursday, June 24 at 10 p.m. Locally, “Boston Med” will be shown on Channel 5, and it will appear on other ABC affiliate stations across the nation and beyond. In addition to the stories about the MGH, the series will feature pieces from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Children’s Hospital.

I thought the MGH community would be interested in seeing the series trailer, which was just posted on the ABC website at http://bostonmed.abcnews.com/. I look forward to watching the compelling stories and outstanding caregivers who will be highlighted on Thursday nights throughout the summer. Thanks to all who helped make this very special prime-time opportunity possible. We will be sending you additional information about the series as we get closer to the premiere.

Peter L. Slavin, MD
MGH President

Should be interesting!

From fear.less – stories of overcoming fear.:

As a Cardiologist, inventor of the DC heart defibrillator, and Nobel Peace Prize winner, the demands on Dr. Lown’s time between work and family were his greatest struggle.

Seriously, demands between work and family the greatest struggle and he still won a Nobel Prize? I don’t feel so bad about my life now!

This could almost be a philosophy of life:

ask yourself: Is this activity making a positive, tangible difference in my life or anyone else’s life? Is it a real, true prerequisite for a tangibly effective activity? Alternatively, am I totally okay with doing this just because I like doing it, laboring under no illusion that it benefits me or anyone else?

via Achievement Porn « Essays « Pete Michaud.

I especially like the last part. So many things, from accupuncture to letting children watch TV, would not be controversial if people stopped asking if they were effective at something and simply accepted them as something humans do.

Seems we’ve been hearing a lot about tefillin lately: The plane diverted because they were a suspicious object. The World Wide Wrap and related events going on at synagogues.

I recently participated in a mind-body medicine program at a major hospital. It’s given me new appreciation of the ritual, as tefillin connect prayer (mind, spirit) to the body and through that connection strengthen the experience of both. Specifically, the shel yad and shel rosh (hand and head tefillin), reflect body and mind. I learned in the mind-body medicine program that neurologically, achieving a higher level of awareness meant increasing the high-level activity in the prefrontal cortex (as opposed to the primitive brain stem) which is the area the shel rosh sits just on top of (and apparently the same area is significant in other spiritual tradtions).

I bought my tefillin at the beginning of my semester in Israel in 1995. I’d been exposed to the practice as that summer as a counselor at Camp Ramah. My first roommate at Tel Aviv University, Steven, was a fellow American Jew who was a bit more advanced than I was in Israeli and Judaic knowledge. Eventually he used that knowledge to leave the dorm for an off-campus apartment but, first, we took a trip to Jerusalem together where he took me to a sort of tefillin factory in Mea Shearim and ordered me a pair. Mine are “smoli,” left-handed, and tied in the Ashkenazi manner; the sofer tied them and cut the outer plastic case to that specification at the time. They were one of if not the largest single purchase I made as a student that semester, costing around 900 shekels, which was around $300 at the time, if I recall. I think they are a bit larger that what you could buy in the States at that price which impresses people in some circles.

My tefillin go on my right hand because I’m left handed. I drew this cheat sheet for wrapping shel yad on the hand, based on reversing the diagram in a book (possibly Aryeh Kaplan’s Tefillin) I found in the Hillel library back in college. I’ve added color to show how it spells out the name of God Shaddai. I’m not sure I’m parsing the letters in an entirely traditional way here, but it looks right.

While I never put them every day, after Hannah was born I did not use them for years. Largely because by the time I got children off to daycare or school I was late to work, but also because I’d heard from Orthodox sources that tefillin should be inspected regularly and putting on a pair that was no longer kosher was worse that wearing none at all. Then, about a year ago, my own Conservative rabbi held a tefillin “learners minyan.” I asked him about the need for inspection, and he said that we didn’t need to worry about it when in our community we just needed to get more people to use tefillin at all; and besides mine seems to be in better shape that others in our congregation.

Tefillin still seem strange. I’m wired to my iPod and smartphone and it seems perfectly normal even though these were futuristic dreams a few years ago. Tefillin have been around for hundreds of years and I never lose the sense that they are foreign. Some people translate the word into English as “phylacteries,” which I think is an inside joke: is there anyone who does not know what “tefillin” means but knows what “phylacteries” are? I picture an ancient equivalent of Reform Jews coming up with a Greek word to make them seem more normal; they must have seemed foreign even then.

Pope Benedict wrote yesterday:

Priests can rightly be expected to be present in the world of digital communications as faithful witnesses to the Gospel, exercising their proper role as leaders of communities which increasingly express themselves with the different ‘voices’ provided by the digital marketplace….
No door can or should be closed to those who… are committed to drawing near to others. (The Priest and Pastoral Ministry in a Digital World: New Media at the Service of the Word.)

Aside from the specifics about Jesus, I pretty much agree with his message.

Are Jews similarly obligated to spread a religious message through Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and other new media? (That is, mainstream Jews–Chabad obviously considers themselves obligated.)

Should we even be reading much less caring about what the Pope thinks?

Can we survive if we don’t?

In my family, we have a ritual on Saturday morning. Max and I are usually the first ones up, so I take him downstairs and let the girls sleep. And by the time they are up, I’m doing actual cooking for breakfast, which we don’t do any other day of the week. At one point, challah french toast was the favorite; more recently, it’s been pancakes or banana muffins or even vegan double-chocolate waffles and pumpkin scones.

Saturday, of course, is also the Jewish Sabbath, Shabbat. Shabbat should be about resting and recharging and spending peaceful time together as a family, and my ritual fits nicely with this. Waking up early, rushing out the door after a bowl of cereal and stopping to buy coffee on the way to where we’re going would not be in the spirit of Shabbat. The only problem is that cooking breakfast isn’t really in the spirit of Shabbat, either; cooking itself is a type of work that traditional Jews don’t do on the Sabbath at all.

This past week I did something different. Every Saturday at 8:30 a.m. our rabbi holds a study session. He e-mails the congregation the day before with the topic. It’s always an interesting topic, but not usually reason enough to leave my wife with both children on her hands on the one day she can stay in bed a little late. This week, however, the topic was so personally compelling that I put a batch of banana muffins in the oven, kissed the family goodbye, and went to learn about why Jacob Neusner, a prominent academic Conservative Rabbi who was raised Reform (like I was) was is returning to reform.

The interesting topic is not Neusner’s choice per se, but what differentiates two denominations that, in real ways, are competing and converging. Our rabbi said that he and a colleague in the Reform movement he is friends with both describe their jobs as encouraging congregants to “make Jewish choices,” and if that meant they are much the same, so what?

Having been fairly involved myself in both movements for different parts of my life I have my own ideas about the differences, and think that when lifelong Conservative Jews call our left-of-center (using “left” colloquially in a non-political sense) Conservative synagogue “like Reform” it’s because they don’t really know the Reform movement. It’s like when people say France is Americanized because of McDonald’s and a Disney park, ignoring the system of laws, work ethic, decentralized public education, religious history, etc. that make America unique.

The next day, I recalled a conversation that made the difference crystal clear. A couple years ago, I had the chance to talk to a local Reform rabbi about my Shabbat observance as a participant in CJP’s Ikkarim program. I asked him specifically about my pancakes-on-Saturday-morning conundrum: how it felt appropriate for my young family, but wasn’t the highest level of observance that I hoped to eventually (like, when the kids went off to college) achieve. His answer was that if cooking breakfast is the Shabbat practice that works for me, I should do it. From the Reform perspective, making a Jewish choice was not about making a choice guided by Jewish law, and there was no “credit” given to a choice that was not meaningful just because it honored Jewish law. This appeals to a lot of people, but it left me unsatisfied. And that’s why even though I agree with Jabob Neusner’s platform, I’m still not a Reform Jew.

Michael Chabon, in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (admittedly a novel, not religious teaching) writes about the “shortfall…. Between commandment and observance, heaven and earth, husband and wife, Zion and Jew. They called the shortfall ‘the world.’” Pancakes on Shabbat are part of “the world.” Figuring out how to live in the world is the challenge.