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.

I finished my Paternity Leave post a few weeks ago with a vague mention of a “great challenge out there for me” and I want to go into a little more detail about what I was thinking.

Specifically, I was thinking about a professional challenge. Over my career, I have found myself solving the same problems again and again. This experience has given me a couple ideas for new software, and more recently an idea for a book. I don’t know that any of these ideas is going to get me rich, but these are problems that more than one company has paid me a decent salary to solve, and people less smart than me have started businesses and published books with less qualifications. And, even if I didn’t get rich developing any of these ideas (getting rich has never been for me a goal in itself) doing so might help me advance in my career, or achieve some recognition, or at least prove an interesting intellectual challenge and fodder for this blog.

So, what’s the problem? It could take a serious commitment of time–prime daytime included–to take any of these ideas very far beyond the napkin-sketch stage. It would sound a lot cooler to say I wrote the next great Web 2.0 application on a free weekend while drinking beer in my pajamas but that’s not going to happen (though there might be something to the idea of advancing in short, creative bursts). I have a job; setting aside the obvious conflicts of time and money, I think that with a full-time job, there is only so much else I can do. More importantly, I have a family, and (though they’ll say I ignore them to play with the computer) I make a conscious effort to spend time on activities that will enrich all of us. Plus, I just fall asleep. Some people may get ahead by working or studying when other people are sleeping, but avoiding sleep will not be my ongoing plan for success.

I’m reading the book Good to Great which says that great organizations and their leader embody the Stockdale Paradox: they confront “brutal” reality without losing hope. Paternity leave was my reality check: I’m not going to learn and create everything I want to in my spare time. It’s going to take a real plan.

Well, I can’t really blame him for anything. He’s just a baby.

He is just over one month old and finally starting to be aware of things. He can’t say anything, of course, but if I look into his eyes, I can hear him. “Hi Daddy!” “I want to play with you and Hannah!” Or, when I was carrying him while putting leftovers from dinner in the refrigerator, “I saw a bottle in there, why don’t you give it to me?” The rest of the cleaning up from dinner would wait.

As part of that she has started to use the computer. She can log herself in, use the trackpad, and do everything except type in the NickJr.com URL (I supposed I should set up a shortcut she can click) to find the Flash games she likes. I’ve even seen her intuit, without reading, where the “Print” or “Next” button is going to be in the bottom right corner of a window. (Isn’t there something inherently validating in seeing your work printed?) She gets frustrated and wants help, which I don’t mind in theory because playing together is better than just letting her watch TV (though not so useful when you need to get housework done) and because, eventually, I’m sure I’ll be concerned about what she’s doing on the Internet on her own.

When Hannah was born we knew she was being born into a different world than we were as far as computers go (we joked about her needing her own e-mail address as a baby), but, I don’t think Hannah’s experience is going to be so different than our own. I first used a computer in kindergarten when I was 5, and was instantly hooked. Maybe there is a certain (young) age at which kids are ready to use computers, and we didn’t miss that much. Of course, what she can do with a computer is going to be different (that kindergarten computer, a Commodore PET, was the single one on a cart that rotated among all the elementary schools in my town).

First we had a (small for me; big for her) climb up a hill. For the top you could get your bearings: in one direction, the “Eiffel” radio tower (off Needham Street) rose above the trees, and in the other direction you could see the JCC’s clock tower.
A number of trails lead down to the Charles River, including one along the river on which you could push a stroller or wheelchair (except for a spot where a tree had fallen). Hannah had far too much fun just picking up pebbles off the ground and throwing them into the water, but really how often do you get to throw pebbles into the actual Charles river?
You can hear the traffic of Route 128 in the background; but if you can ignore it, it feels like you are much further out in the country.

There is a trail map and other excellent information about this and other parks at the Newton Conservators website.

What is most disturbing to me is that Barney appears primarily on public television. I tend to think of public television as an institution that exists, among other reasons, to provide an alternative source of information that doesn’t depend on a profit motive. So it seems kind of hypocritical for a studio they employ to be starting intellectual property lawsuits for apparently commercial reasons.

Interestingly this isn’t the first time I’ve written about issues with PBS children’s shows not playing nice when confronted with real-world issues, and the common thread seems to HIT Entertainment, a childrens-media company owned by a private equity firm Apax. So, has PBS made a deal with the devil? I remember a time (maybe when I was kid) when it seemed appropriate to let kids watch PBS (but not other networks) because Sesame Street, et al didn’t seem so “bad” for them. These days, there doesn’t seem to be much of a difference.

I’ll probably keep sending a little donation to WGBH, but I should send a similar one to the EFF for pointing out this issue.

(The most interesting thing about Barney to me is that my two-and-a-half year old, who loved the show when she was one, has already outgrown Barney [and Teletubbies] for characters with more depth.)