Safe Words

Some of the recent things going on in life recently (IVF/ART/fertility, funerals & loss) are pretty raw, so I’m going to wait for a bit for them to settle before going into to many details.

In the meantime, there are some less-weighty things of some note, which I’ll mention in FIFO order.

The Franchise’s show at the Treehouse Lounge was good, but not as well attended as we had hoped. We got a few decent recordings- once we pick which ones will go public I’ll share them here and elsewhere. I was particularly happy with “Footsteps”, which came out just right.

On Star Wars Day, I hosted a civilization game (this time with planked and baked salmon instead of cholent).

This was an interesting game: the player who was slotted to play Africa skipped, and so we had a hole, but then Toby joined there about four turns in. It was a very crowded board, with all of the experienced players in the North-central board. We didn’t get very far: we ended at havdalah, and one new player was very slow- that player tended to view the determinations of where to move tokens with the deliberation that one wishes our actual government would use in making decisions (oooh, I went there…)

The funniest moment was of course the small band of Italian farmers who kept trying to fight their way out of Egypt, during which time Egypt experienced a flood, famine, pestilence, and eventually Iconoclasm & Heresy. Of course it did.. The Egyptians had even expressed fear that the Italians would join with the Babylonians or Africans against them! I was waiting for the next calamity to be “death of the firstborn.” Amusingly, those Italian farmers survived until the end of the game, regardless of what Merneptah’s inscription said… (tl;dr – one of the many, many too-early obituaries of the Jewish people, from ~1200 BCE)

We didn’t get very far, but our finish did have something notable: Shoshana’s first victory! Yay, Shoshana!

Final scores:
Shoshana, Asia, 1689
Michael, Crete, 1651
Ron, Babylon, 1511
David, Thrace, 1398
Erin, Illyria, 1250
Alan, Italy, 1239
Rich, Egypt, 974
Toby, Africa, 924

Whee!

Then, after Sarah returned, we headed up to New Jersey for our RMA consult (more on that later), but decided to make a weekend of it. I finally encountered the vaunted Gotham wines, and I had expected to be underwhelmed. Um, NO. I haven’t seen a selection of kosher wine that good in one place, especially with a helpful guy who was suggesting the oodles of stuff for me to try (and what not to try, even more important).

Two which were remarkable so far were a 2007 Chateau Fourcas Dupre Bordeaux and a 2011 Recanati Reserve Petit Syrah / Zinfandel blend. Both were really outstanding, and quite worth it.

I did get to see the Jewish Center, which had two things I liked a great deal: the formal (top hat + vest) attire of the rabbi & gabbaim, and also an absolutely stunning sanctuary where the mehitza isn’t oppressive. Beautiful! I could have done with less talking, but I think that’s probably true almost everywhere.

Our weekend got cut short when we heard the news about the funeral, and logistics took over.

Since then, my mom visited during Shavuot (a lovely visit) and we’re just starting to begin to slow down the whirlwind. Or maybe we’ll have it spin up.

Gordon Lederman, zt”l

I am sad.

I just came from the funeral of a friend. This particular friend was someone who means a whole lot to a lot of people, and I won’t presume to a degree of closeness which I don’t have. However, he influenced me (and lots of other people) in some extremely profound ways.

When Sarah and I were newly married and I went to stay for a Shabbat at Kesher Israel, I accepted a hospitality invitation, and it was Gordon who took me in. I didn’t know anyone, and he made me feel completely welcome. I later learned that this was just who he was: he *always* made people feel welcome, and he welcomed people into his heart in the same way that he welcomed them into his home.

I learned a lot from him over the first few years I was at Kesher. I saw his devotion to his family- he spoke lovingly and often of them, and his apartment was surrounded by their pictures. He was a mainstay of the synagogue, specifically in the unsung tasks of setting up and cleaning up. He neither asked for any particular credit nor sought any recognition for doing this- he simply saw a task which needed to be done and did it.

He had tremendous drive to do bikur holim (visiting the sick) among other things. When he was single, lots of women were interested in him. I remember him telling Sarah and I that the way he knew that Lisa was the right woman for him was that he mentioned that there was a hospitalized person he had wanted to visit who was quite a long way away (if I recall correctly, the patient had been moved). Without missing a beat, she said, “Let’s go!” It says something about him that the quality he prized in a spouse was an eagerness to help others.

I once answered a couple of questions for him about networking, and it turned out that he was doing research for the 9/11 commission report. The copy of he autographed for me is something I treasure.

I’ve long said “I want to be Gordon when I grow up”. He was born just 3 years before me, but always seemed to have himself so much more together- I had the sense that he was the one who exemplified the things which I should be doing.

I think the story which truly captures the essence of my experience of Gordon is that when we came to visit him after he got sick, and we were talking, when he learned about our health and infertility problems, his response was “I’ll add you to my tehillim (prayer) list”. I think it takes a special person to, when faced with his own terminal Illness, make a point of praying for the recovery of others. And yet that was just Gordon being Gordon.

It is my feeling that he was the single best man in my generation. I miss him already.

May the memory of the righteous be for a blessing.

One ligament to bind them

Last Thanksgiving, I spent hours making a tasty onion recipe and then when I handled a turkey at arm’s length, I felt a “pop” and my neck and elbow started to hurt like crazy. I treated this on my own for a bit, and then eventually saw my regular physiatrist, who diagnosed me with tennis elbow, gave me an OT routine and a brace, and told me to otherwise rest (making me completely nuts).

Rest was making me nuts because it was no biking, no exercise, and worst of all, no drumming! Augh!

So after roughly four months of that, a cortisone shot, and some custom bracing, I still wasn’t getting better. I also was getting really frustrated because the treatments and descriptions of tennis elbow all referred to wrist-based flexion problems, and yet I was also having pain when I did things with my wrists In a neutral position (like tie my shoes, lift a glass, or pull my pants up).

So the OT gave me a referral to a different physiatrist who did sports medicine – Dr. Victor Ibrahim, who is the doctor for DC United, and of course his is a non-insurance practice.

But when we went in – I had asked Sarah to come with me as a second pair of eyes – I noticed a difference: I described my history and asked “what treatment should I be doing?”

His response was “well, when you have a treatment which isn’t working, either you need to change the treatment or you have the wrong diagnosis. Let’s confirm your diagnosis.”

And so we went to the ultrasound machine, the first imaging used in the $5000 of treatment I’d had for this elbow, and he said almost immediately “I see the issue- your tendon is inflamed, but the one below that – the one which controls pinching motions of the fingers- it’s torn through” and of course no amount of OT will rehab a torn tendon – it will generally make it worse! He kept looking, and also saw that the ligament at back of my elbow (the UCL) was also torn through- he showed this by pulling my arm while under ultrasound- you could see inflammatory goop shoot out (ew), and even visually you could see a radical difference between my right (bad) and left (good) arms- my right arm basically looked like it came out of joint. Dr. Ibrahim said that this sort of damage probably built up over a while, so it wasn’t like this was something which I had done in the last four months while attempting to rest.

So this is a spectacular misdiagnosis, and is exactly the type of thing which could have been prevented (along with spending thousands of dollars of my own money, and thousands of dollars of UHC’s money) if the diagnosing physician had used imaging. Now, I know that there is a push to do exactly the opposite in the name of cost reduction, and that’s one of the reasons why I thought it was so important to document precisely what happened here: lack of information at the outset led to an incorrect diagnosis, led to lots of expensive, ineffective incorrect treatment (and lots of patient suffering).

So back to Dr Ibrahim. He gave me some options, which he listed from most invasive to least invasive:

• I could have a Tommy John surgery, guaranteeing that I wouldn’t have a 95 mile-per-hour fastball ever again (because that is a worry- I’m certain I can get at least a 9.5 mile/hour fastball within a radian of my target…)
• I could have a stem cell transplant, where they perform liposuction, spin off the fat, do some magic and turn it into stem cells which regenerate the tendon and ligament. Science!
• PRP – he recommended against this because spinning my own plasma and injecting it into the joints could further spread babesia and Lyme, which meant that he got a gold star for caution in my book
• prolotherapy – this is an injection of dextrose into the ligament and/or tendon which can trigger an inflammation and cause healing. Mechanism of action is unknown, but hey, it is with aspirin too, so not such a shock.

Sarah has had both prolo and PRP, and they’ve done wonders as stabilizing her pelvis is concerned, but she described them as excruciating.

Dr Ibrahim offered me these choices, but recommended prolo- and amazingly, when I accepted that option, was willing to do it right then (!) and doesn’t even charge for it (!!) [his argument is that the cost of dextrose and a syringe is next to nothing, so should be included in the office visit]. So I had a few shots, and they hurt about as bad as you would expect a gigantic needle being shoved into a torn tendon to hurt- which is to say, OW. I’d put it about a 5 on my pain scale, but that’s only because the testicular torsion blows everything else out of the water as a 9 (I presume 10 would be my head spinning around Exorcist-style).

So after painful things it takes me a few minutes to recover, so I was lying down, and Sarah was talking to Dr I about the pain in her arms, and her Lyme disease. He said, “let me take a look at those” (!!!) and proceeded to ultrasound her arms (the first imaging ever done on her arms, which have caused her disabling pain for 7+ years) where he then said “I see a whole lot of scar tissue- this looks like the type of stuff that can be caused by infectious disease- this looks excruciating”. At this, Sarah started crying, because this was the first real validation she had ever gotten that there was an actual physical, measurable, objective source for the pain she has been in for most of a decade. The real kicker was when he said:

there is something we can do to remove the scar tissue and make you feel better.

Holy $h!7! Really?

The treatment is called a debridement, and basically it’s an injection of some goop which dissolves scar tissue and allows the body to function normally.

Woah.

So we scheduled a follow-up- a joint appointment where Sarah would get a debridement and I would get another prolo if necessary (expected). That was last week.

I had my second course of prolo- it turned out that my UCL only needed one (yay!) and my tendon seems to be doing pretty well. Sarah, on the other hand got under the ultrasound, and her sinovium lit up like a Christmas tree – Dr I said that this was likely active Lyme. He said that the risk of doing the debridement when the infection was live like that was really high, and could leave her bedridden, which would be intolerable, so he had to delay her treatment. Mega-bummer.

But it does impress me all the more, that here you have someone who was all ready to perform a weird procedure on someone, and then didn’t, because he didn’t feel like it would be in the best interest of the patient. Yay Hippocrates!

And He saw our affliction

And He saw our affliction (Deut 26:7) This refers to the disruption of family life as it states, “And God saw the Jewish people and God knew.”
Passover Haggadah

It is no news that Sarah and I have been going through the amazing suck-fest that is infertility for the last several years.

There’s a lot of moments of trying to hold it together while acquaintances are gushing about the latest {pregnancy | childbirth}, (the friends mostly don’t do that to us) and there’s the pit in the stomach that comes once that gets started – the sense that this is not going to be a good night. There’s the intrusive medical stuff – shots, pokes and prods, testing, monitoring and sampling, the mind-numbing expense of it all, but the worst for me is the question of why God puts this particular barrier in our way – given that the first commandment is to be fruitful and multiply, how is this fair at all?

And then I beat myself up for asking about fairness – because honestly, I’ve had more than my share of blessing in this world, and “fairness” would mean that all I should get is an unmarked grave. Didn’t the patriarchs and matriarchs all face this? Yes, but according to the text they were pissed off too, so maybe that’s okay.

So what’s new in this is that Sarah and I have finally come to believe that IVF is the way we need to go. Sigh.

There’s perfectly valid medical reasons for this, and we’re investigating multiple options for clinics.

Now, this morning, I mentioned this to someone, and s/he told me “you can always adopt”. I presume s/he was trying to offer helpful advice, but s/he was actually being extremely hurtful. I pulled him/her outside and corrected him/her privately, and let the person know why that was such an unhelpful suggestion.

First, neither Sarah nor I are genetic snobs – we both believe that love is thicker than blood. I learned this from my maternal grandparents zt”l (may the memories of the righteous be for a blessing) – our family would routinely pick up “strays” for lack of a better word – family friends, distant cousins, in-laws, out-laws, etc, and then a gathering just wouldn’t be complete without them. This is a characteristic of my grandmother in particular which ranks her as a person whom I want to emulate – she and my grandfather are two of the finest human beings I’ve ever known. Sarah and I have long said that we want to be parents more than we want to be pregnant, so adoption was certainly not ruled out.

That said, adoption does have challenges, and only a fool would ignore that, so we had looked at it as a “second” choice, but preferable to IVF, when we started having miscarriages two years ago. We went to an informational session at a local agency (not linked for their privacy), and what we learned shocked us.

We had always thought that there was this vast number of children waiting in orphanages to be adopted, that there was a need for parents to step up, and that the real challenge was just getting qualified as an acceptable home.

HAH!

We could not have been more wrong.

So it turns out that in truth the number of infants who are adoptable in public adoptions (and by that I mean by non-relatives, via agencies), is a tiny fraction of the number of parents who are waiting in line to do the adopting. That agency we went to was one of the largest in the Mid-Atlantic region, and they placed 40 children in their busiest year recently, with a more typical year being closer to 25.

According to an adoption advocacy group (you have to dig for the number here – it’s table 1, column 7), 22,291 infants in the United States were placed for adoption in unrelated domestic adoptions. (Statistics on adoption are extremely opaque for some reason, and get aggregated in ways which obscure that truth).

By comparison, according to the CDC, the various types of Assistive Reproductive Technology (ART) which includes IVF, IUI, and procedures which happen in an office but does not include fertility injections or pills, 61,610 infants were born as the result of ART in 2011.

So adoption is actually, from a statistical point of view, not a better bet than IVF.

So why was it so bad for him/her to suggest this?

First, it was unsolicited advice, which honestly isn’t welcome on touchy, sensitive subjects. I don’t know how other people who are going through infertility feel, but as for me, I’m mourning the loss of some innocence – that something which I thought would be easy is going to not take climbing a mountain – it’ll take picking up the mountain and walking under it.

Second, the adoption agency said that you have to “market” yourself – you have to “sell” yourself to the birth mother, who will select your family from several families who are presented to her. So you’re competing with other families who all have similar if not the same dream of being parents, and remember what I said about “fair” before? Well, that applies here too – so how can I feel good about competing with other people in a way where if I win, someone else loses their dream? Geez, that’s horrible. That’s zero-sum thinking at it’s worst, and yet I can’t seem to escape it when thinking about how the agency presented how you have to behave. The agency (and everyone we’ve talked to about it) says you basically have to be willing to throw the extremely sharp elbow to be successful – you have to be completely focused and goal-oriented, and willing to be “that guy.” Even if you go the “hire a lawyer to do a “private” adoption, you’re basically outsourcing the problem of moral agency – I’m asking someone else to throw the sharp elbow on my behalf.

I’m not willing to rule it out – I won’t say I wouldn’t adopt, but after that info session, it dropped to the bottom of the pile below IVF.

Third – and this doesn’t, fortunately, apply to us – there are lots of couples where one partner is okay with adoption and one isn’t – the same is true for any other particular technology (egg donor, sperm donor, IUI, IVF, blah blah blah) – so saying “you can always do X” can be twisting a knife into someone who is already experiencing marital strife – and this is a painful, painful issue.

I can’t really explain the depth of feeling to anyone who hasn’t been through it – it’s experiential and awful, and can become consuming.

We’re happy to hear individuals’ experiences regarding their own journey, but suggestions like “have you tried relaxing” and the like are so profoundly not helpful, and in fact are hurtful.

So God willing, we’ll be able to say that we’d have children made with love and science.

Gimme Some of the Good Stuff

First and foremost, The Franchise is coming back to the DC night life, with our comeback gig scheduled for May 2 @ 8PM at the newly-opening Treehouse Lounge over at 1006 Florida Ave NE. W00t!

We’ll be doing a half-and-half set – about half old favorites, and half stuff from our forthcoming album Movers and Shakers. (Aside: remember when “groups of songs you buy on iTunes” were called “albums”? I liked that name…). We’re still finalizing the set list now…

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Our Sedarim were good, although our first one went from 9 people to 5 people abruptly (all due to illness, boo!), and so we ended up with brisket and chicken soup coming out of our ears. Now, it’s good brisket and chicken soup, so that’s not a bad thing, but it was too bad that we didn’t get to see Sarah’s sister, our nephew, and a pair of dear friends. C’est la vie…

We did have a few treats – the awesome cookies made by Rella – clearly, she wants to see more of me! Also, we had some fabulous wine: a 2011 hagafen pinot noir was my personal favorite, although a 2009 Chateau le Bourdieu Bordeaux Medoc and a 2011 Tishbi Cabernet Sauvignon were close contenders. A disappointment was the Yogev Cab / Petit Verdot blend, but it suffered from being cups 3/4 – it’s extremely tannic, and so is an extremely bad fit for drinking quickly without complimenting really, really heavy beef (and those cups were *after* the meal).

A surprise hit this year was Sarah’s marmouna from Foods of Israel Today (excellent book – everything in it is good) – she made it with serrano peppers, and it was hot in a way that very little Jewish cuisine is, and it was fantastic.

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After all of the sturm und drang, we didn’t end up making any quinoa so far this year. Go figure. I’ll have to make some for the last days, or I’ll feel silly.

I Wish I Could Quit You (an Open Letter to the Va’ad of Greater Washington) – UPDATED

UPDATE 3/29: I received a response from the head of the va’ad today, indicating that they support the current approach, although they hope that the signage will be better next year. That’s a tad pareve for my taste, and while it would improve the situation, it does not address the larger issue of what makes this market different than all other markets?.

>>I sent this letter to Va’ad of Greater Washington yesterday (3/21) in the early afternoon, indicating that I would make it open unless their response was such that I should not. I did not receive a response from them. While everyone is busy with the run-up to Pesah, they are still certifying the kashrut of the establishments and I would argue therefore are still obligated to hear and address issues brought to them by members of the public in a timely manner.

Dear esteemed members of the Va’ad,

In prior years, during the run-up to Passover, the kosher markets (Kosher Mart, Shalom’s, and Shaul’s) would all close off and label their non-kosher-for-passover aisles, leaving only their kosher for passover items easily available. This had the effect of making it possible, although difficult, to purchase non-passover items during the time before passover. Anything which was visible but not kosher for passover was segregated and labeled in a highly visible manner “items in this section are not kosher for passover” and the like.

This behavior was cited as a benefit, and was contrasted with other cities when the question “why can’t we have a kosher deli counter in a Safeway, etc” is brought up – one knew, that regardless of the labeling of an individual product, if it was on the shelf, the va’ad stood behind the passover kashrut of that product, and the individual shopper had a position on which he or she could rely. Personally, I liked this a great deal, and have been a great defender of this status quo – I am known as one of the small number of people who will routinely defend the va’ad’s behavior and policies when it comes to promoting kashrut of restaurants, upholding standards, and doing the right thing. The benefit of the policy is extremely high for people who are beginning to observe the mitzvah of kashrut, notably my students – I teach kashrut at Kesher Israel to many people, including conversion students for the regional conversion court, and have been a va’ad mashgiah (supervisor).

However, this year, there has been a change, and I am deeply troubled.

I went to Shalom’s today, the Thursday which is four shopping (non-shabbat) days before Passover, fully expecting to see something similar, that I would have the benefit of being able to know what items were determined to be kosher for passover even though their labeling did not reflect that fact (and there are of course oodles of such items). Imagine my surprise when I began walking down the aisle, and I noticed canned beans and corn! My first thought was “oh – that’s right – there’s a big Sefardic community here, this must be okay for the people who eat kitniyot (legumes, corn and the like).” As I continued down the next aisle, my realization that something was greatly amiss came to fruition when I saw the boxes of whole wheat and white flour pasta. Hm. Well, I’m not aware of any communities which matir (permit) that, so there must be something funny going on.

Then I went over to buy some sodas, and I saw the sign “some items in this aisle are not kosher for passover” – I have seen less helpful signs in my life, but not often. I could have figured that out without a sign at all!

It was only when I asked another shopper that she pointed out that up above the aisles were markers indicating that some aisles were marked “passover” in much the same way that Giant would mark an aisle “Kosher” or “Latino.”

I saw signs all over the store indicating that shoppers needed to check passover labeling because other shoppers would have put non-kosher-for-passover merchandise in with the passover stuff.

I wonder now, whether the meat that I bought without a second thought actually *was* kosher for passover – after all, there’s apparently plenty of stuff in the store which isn’t! Note: I have since called Shalom’s, and their meat line has been kosher for Passover since March 1st: I don’t want to convey a false impression, but my complaint stands.

I am appalled by this change, and I want to know precisely why this would be okay from a “kosher” market (which I would contend is now placing a stumbling block before the blind in behaving more like a Giant than like a real kosher grocery), but the va’ad’s hashgaha would not be allowed to be placed on a deli counter in a Safeway, Giant, Wegman’s, or the like. I’ve been a va’ad mashgiah, and a big va’ad defender (ask all of the people at Shabbat meals), and this is a bridge too far.

I intend to publish this letter on the Internet within the next 24 hours, unless your response conveys a reason to me why that would not be in the best interest of the Washington Jewish community.

Are Gender Roles Kosher for Passover?

Derek Thompson writes about the decline of marriage in the Atlantic, and while the general problem as we have it now is one with which I agree, and while I think that the best way to not be poor is to get married (and stay married) before having children, I take issue with something he said. Specifically:

Once upon a time, the typical marriage, as Justin Wolfers has explained, involved special roles for the husband and wife. He would work. She would stay home. It was an efficient arrangement where opposites attracted. Men who wanted to be executives would marry women who wanted to be housewives. And, since almost half of women had no independent earnings 40 years ago, there were a lot of women who just wanted to work at home and raise a family.

So, this. Now, Thompson is correctly and accurately describing a certain period in American history, for the middle and upper middle class households. He’s completely omitting the experience of the lower-class households, where both parents have always worked, because they haven’t had a choice. But my bigger complaint with the paragraph is this: he’s describing the period roughly from 1930ish to 1970ish, and acting like it was the whole of human history.

So, before the industrial revolution, you had agriculture or cottage industry, where parents and children worked together in their fields or houses. Fathers and mothers may do different jobs, but there was no concept of not working- but nobody is getting a salary either.

Once the industrial revolution hits, you have fathers, mothers, and children working together in the factories, basically until the child-labor laws put a stop to that. Around then you do start to see a lot of gender segregation of employment, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, but everyone is getting paid.

Upper class women start (late 19th) getting pulled back from work, and that’s around when the suffrage movement starts getting some serious steam. Women were absolutely working supporting families in the teens and twenties: my grandmother a”h was a Bell telephone operator, and there were lots more like her.

Only in the 30s, with the mass layoffs of the depression, (with the Rosie the Riveter interlude) followed by the post-war return, did you start to see the idea of the GI housewife really take hold in the way he’s describing, at least en masse.

So for most of human history, the roles are something other than what he’s describing: really, the lesson could better be that (to quote Peart) “changes aren’t permanent, but change is”. Perhaps we need to accept the shifting nature of the roles of husband and wife- accepting that there *are* roles, but that one roles change, and then perhaps we can make peace with the mythical past, to better understand the future (let alone the present)?

Those who forget history are, well, something or other happens to them, I don’t remember what- it’ll come to me eventually, around the same time that it comes to Mr Thompson.

Plowshares for Everyone!

This past Shabbat, Sarah was extraordinarily nice, and let me host a civilization game even though she was in town. Thanks!

This was one of the more peaceful games I’ve seen: 6 players, one n00b (W, playing Egypt, of course, who is a *delightful* fellow). Asia, Thrace, and Crete were out of play. Interestingly, we would have had two more players, but they chose to ditch an opportunity to improve a society by introducing monotheism, rule of law, literacy, and free trade, and go to CPAC instead. Well! I know who came out ahead on that trade! Notably, the three most experienced players were all on the northern side of the board. We called it at havdalah, so it was on the shorter side.

Final scores:
Assyria (me): 3449
Babylon (SDP): 3106
Illyria (MP): 2966
Italy (RR): 2461
Egypt (W): 1623
Africa (JC, no not that one): 1531

I was particularly surprised that as I started to pull ahead, and there was even some discussion of this at the table, ere was not a “dogpile David” moment: this is where the aggressiveness of an E or A or the sheer randomness of a Matt would have probably knocked me down about three pegs. I think SDP is the real success story in the civ games: she’s grown from perennially being at the bottom to being one of the consistently strongest players.

Coinage was a clutch early purchase, and let me completely manipulate the taxation rates, allowing me to really get the better of the trade, and thus technology, cards. A good game, this summer will hopefully have more.

Optimistic Thoughts

Three unusual things that made me smile happened today. First, and best, Sarah told me that for the second time she was listening to Grooveshark and our song “Superhero” came on. W00t! Happily, we didn’t get the awkward Spinal Tap “in the ‘where are they now’ file” DJ line, and that is definitely our most radio-friendly song. I’m still really happy with how that one turned out (including the improv in the middle, and how much Noah improved my initial concept for the song).

We got a perfect basic track of a better arrangement of “Best Day” last week, leaving Patrick’s “March of the Octopus” as the only basic track left; then it’s the twelve million hours of overdubs, corrections, and mixing, baby! Easy-peasy.

Second, Coyote shows that the number of breweries in the US is at a 125-year high. In the words of a great American character, “To alcohol! The cause of… and solution to… all of life’s problems.”

And then there’s this bit of WTF from 1952, which will henceforth be my example of how far society has come with regard to issues of gender equality, patriarchy, and the like. I give to you Mystery in Space!

It’s worth remembering that many current assumptions weren’t always so.

OU812 (or Oh, You are at it Again!) — UPDATED

The Orthodox Union has decided to let the let the nuts (that is, the so-called authorities who provide what they claim is rabbinic guidance, not to malign the delightful fruit of many trees) out of the cage once more. They published their annual list of insane additions to the prohibited foods category called kitniyot, and it has something particularly egregious:

The following may be Kitniyot and are therefore not used:
Amaranth
Peanuts
Quinoa — update, see below

Now, peanuts are a long debate, and most folks I know have the custom of not eating them (note the phrasing!). Amaranth is a specialty product, and I don’t have a dog in that fight. Quinoa, on the other hand, has become a flash point for the battle for the soul of Orthodox Judaism between those who think that the answer to modern questions lies in the reasoning of those came before us, and those who want to make it up as they go along. Yes, that is a harsh way of putting it, but I believe the harshness is justified and even required: “You shall not hate your brother in your heart;… You shall surely rebuke him” (Leviticus 19:17).

One of the decisors of the OU was concerned that quinoa would be prepared on machines which also prepare wheat, raising a concern of hametz (leaven). Another (R. Belsky) took an uncommon position that the category of kitniyot could be expanded, and characterized the position that held that quinoa would not be kitniyot as “lenient”.

In all of this, it should be noted that the Star-K, not known as a bunch of liberals, certifies quinoa for Passover.

The actual statement by the OU is to put quinoa in the category of “you can own it, feed it to a sick person, an infant, a pet, etc” – But leavened products aren’t allowed to be owned or eaten by pretty much anyone (except the grievously ill) and no benefit is allowed from them! So what to make of this?

My contention is that the OU is all over the place here, and does not have a good halakhic (or scientific) basis for what they are saying. Let’s do this in order:

1. If the OU are concerned that quinoa may be produced in a way that it could be mixed in with hametz, but it is not in fact hametz itself (no one says it is), then the answer is that you could say that it would require supervision. The OU did not say that.

2. If the OU are concerned about hametz, why in the world would they include this on a list of *kitniyot* products? I’m not allowed to feed *my dog* hametz, while I do feed my dog kitniyot. If there is a real concern of hametz, that is a Biblical prohibition, and allowing people to come close to that is untenable and is precisely the sin of “leading the community astray.”

3. Saying that the list of kitniyot is fixed isn’t the *lenient* opinion, it’s the *normative* opinion, per the Chayei Adam. That’s why we can have potatoes. The Chayei Adam said that thetakahna (decree) only affected the species that the rabbis who issued it knew about, so no new world plants could have been included. Denigrating the normal and calling it lenient is a violation of lo titgodedu (don’t cause schism), which is de-oraita (Biblical) (ie I eat quinoa, and will do so this year again, as poskened (ruled) by my rabbi [there is a valid opinion that it's fine] – the OU position will lead to people not eating at each other’s houses).

4. “May be kitniyot”? Seriously? This is a takana (decree) not even a derabbanan (rabbinic commandment), and we have the principle “safek derabbanan l’kulah” (a doubt about a rabbinic issue is ruled leniently). So, nu, how precisely is saying “the following may be Kitniyot and are therefore not used” following that principle?

5. The biggest market for quinoa is the gluten free people *who have nothing to do with wheat or any of the five grains*, so, no, it’s extremely unlikely to have any wheat or other hametz in it, and if they left their ivory tower and got out a bit, they might have figured this out.

The OU is leading people astray with this, and they have much to answer for.

UPDATE: Victory! The OU has removed quinoa from the kitniyot list for the year! They left the weasel-category of “may be kitniyot” in place for peanuts and amaranth (which is not reasonable), but we can be heartened by the triumph of sanity. Yay!