Building a room, speedily

As I mentioned in my last post, there has been very little Tea in my life since the local Urasenke chapter closed in August. There will be new classes soon through an administratively separate organization known as the Tankokai.

Last Sunday, the Tankokai held a refresher course for those who have been without Tea for these many months and who fear they have forgotten everything they know.

Not fifteen minutes ago, this room had nothing but chairs in it.

There are currently no available tea rooms in the DC area, but the Tankokai has a tea room that fits, piled high, in the back of an SUV. We had a room rented at the McLean Community Center, and at the appointed time this tea-room-in-an-SUV drove up to the entrance. The six students and two teachers rapidly brought everything, tatami by tatami and utensil by utensil, into the room.

And then, BOOM! Instant tea room.

I think the thing that impressed me the most was the sunken hearth of the ro season, which was only sunken a few inches but managed to pull off the recessed look despite sticking up out of the ground.

The horizontal black line near the bottom of the image is in fact an invisible wall. There is an invisible door at the spot where the black line ends on the left.

I performed the first Tea of the day, and was greatly relieved to find that I had not forgotten as much as I had expected. Everything felt quite natural and ordinary within this instant room, except for the act of sitting on the floor and making the three motions necessary to first open and then close a rice paper door. (As you can see, the door was invisible.) This felt especially odd when the teacher corrected me for holding the door from too high a position.

I'm looking forward to the new Tea school opening later this spring. Until then, I should try making do with my own partially imaginary rooms.

Seasonality and Music

Last fall, the Washington DC branch of the Urasenke school closed its doors. This spring, likely in March, a new complex of classrooms will open up downtown, in a Metro-accessible location. There is a lot of good to this change, some bittersweet, and the inconvenience of a solid half-year without tea classes.


Happily, tomorrow I will be in a tea class for the first time since early August. It will be a refresher course on the most basic tea preparation. As part of my preparation, I pulled out my books last night to research seasonal names for February.


Tea is deeply attuned to the seasons in an oddly stylized way. Last year on a very cold April day, I used a seasonal word that seemed to fit the weather perfectly. I was told that the word was inappropriate, since it was a word for February or March. The seasonal conceit of Tea looks forward, toward what is coming.


Looking for seasonal words, I decided that February might be the most ascetically appropriate month for Tea. There is a poem appropriate to this time of year that is basically Tea, crystallized and frozen:


To those who lust after only cherry blossoms, I want to point out the mountain hamlet spring grasses breaking through the snow. -Ietaka*


I spent the early evening reading about February and contemplating the rich tapestry of seasonality, where an icy wind can bring about a parting of snow, which implies that spring will come eventually, but which also tells us that it is February, that there will be a fire in the hearth. There will be specific bowls and certain sweets to keep the guests warm but to remind them that trees will be budding soon.


After a while, I exchanged the Tea books for prayer books so that my husband and I could greet the Sabbath. When we reached L'cha Dodi, a mystical celebration of the coming of Shabbat, S--- chose a tune normally associated with a bedtime song about four angels. It's a very common thing in Judaism to use the tune for one song/prayer when singing another. In this case, whether or not S--- meant it, I saw a connection between the mystical Jerusalem-of-the-mind Shabbat and the angels that visit the house at the beginning of the meal. 


It's good to live in a world of implications and deeper meanings, where an insight into one part of a tradition will open up another part, drawing new meaning along with perspective. It's also good to sing, and it's good to keep an eye on nature.




*Translation from Chado: The Way of Tea, A Japanese Tea Master's Almanac, by Sasaki Sanmi.

Part II

Continued from previous post.

Admittedly, the "something" that happened wasn't that big. There are basically two German-Jewish customs that I was aware of. One is a penchant for over-dressing on Shabbat. In my grad school days I regularly treated Friday night prayer services as formal or semi-formal events, though I am mellowing a bit now. The other, somewhat famously cited German Jewish custom, is a change to the order of pre-meal rituals.

German Jewish custom: ceremonially wash hands --> Kiddush (sanctification of Shabbat over wine) --> blessing over the bread

Everyone else in the Jewish universe:  Kiddush --> ceremonially wash hands --> blessing over the bread

The one place where I know this to come up is the Jewish Theological Seminary, where on the Sukkot holiday they host these big, wonderful meals. After everyone has found their tables, someone gets on the mic to say that it's a German custom to wash before Kiddush, and tonight everyone's following that custom. (After some hours online, I have learned that the Conservative Movement is a big fan of this system, but only when a large group of people are eating together and it would be cumbersome to get up from the table.)

While I now have a pretty solid understanding of this custom vis-a-vis Jewish law, I was mostly going with the fact that it felt right when, about a month ago, I decided to start washing before Kiddush. My feeling was that, if the purpose of washing hands was to remove ritual impurities, then why would one intentionally keep those ritual impurities upon one's hands while praising God and drinking sanctified wine? After all, as the psalmist says, "Who may climb to God's holy place? One who has clean hands and a pure heart" (psalm 24).

As it happens, my reasoning has nothing to do with the actual reasons for the custom to wash before Kiddush.  Still, it was the reason I cited when I shared my decision with S---, along with  an aside about my past thoughts on a German minhag. A few days later, I went deep into internet research mode.

The two most noteworthy facts I learned about the custom of washing before Kiddush are as follows:
1) Jewish law cannot provide a very solid defense for this behavior. In fact, the survival of this custom is an example of family minhag trumping rabbis with big books of facts.
2) Chazal (i.e., the biggest, brightest rabbis from waaaaay back when) were in the habit of washing before Kiddush.

I also, it turned out, ignited S---'s interest and enthusiasm at the idea of picking up minhag Ashkenaz (German Jewish customs.) To that end, we have bought a book. After all, this is America. If I want to learn about something I can't easily pick up from Wikipedia, it's time to head to the bookstore.

At this time, we have a copy of one Shorshei Minhag Ashkenaz, bright-eyed enthusiasm and a readiness to put down some oddly logical roots.

Deep Roots, New Roots

In my latest bout of iconoclasm, I've decided to follow German Jewish customs.

It took me a while to grow into this decision.  My sense is that when one converts to Judaism, one should choose a particular minhag (custom, though in this case the word has culture-of-origin overtones) and practice Judaism through that minhag's prism. However, nobody told me that I needed a minhag when I joined the tribe, and for a while I maintained a snotty-nosed, "Well, nobody told me I had to pick one" attitude.

For years though  I was attracted to the idea of learning and adhering to German Jewish customs. I'm a Jew of German descent, and even though that German descendancy isn't Jewish, it still seemed like a nice way to go. However, I didn't consider this idea too deeply or too practically. After all, I reasoned, although I was attracted to the idea of going Yekke, I was sooner or later bound to marry someone. That someone most likely came from somewhere non-Germanic (German-descended Jews making up just a tiny portion of the Jewish immigration to America post-1880). That someone would likely feel a not-uncommon twinge of discomfort at things German. If it was my whimsy versus that someone's gut-negativity, then there was no question that that someone's family tradition would prevail.

And so it was that I never looked too deeply into German Jewish customs. Ironically, I lived in Washington Heights in upper Manhattan for a year, in the heart of the largest and most solid German Jewish community in the world, and I never looked too hard at the culture.

After I left Washington Heights I moved south to Washington DC (I'm fond of W's), where I was dating S---. It just so happens that S--- (name concealed, Victorian-novel-style) has strong German ancestry, his grandparents having moved from Germany to New York when S---'s father was young. No one in S--'s family is particularly observant, so what traditions we keep are pretty much mainstream traditional-halakhic-egalitarian-observant-minyan-lovin' Judaism. Through the courtship process I didn't think about S---'s ethnic background as relating to my desire to take on a German minhag.

And then, something happened....


To be continued.

Having to Force a Meaningful Moment

Thursday and Friday were Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year and the start of the High Holidays. Of the various names for the High Holidays, my favorite is the Yamim Nora’im, most commonly translated at the Days of Awe. A cantor friend of mine once called them “The Terrible Days,” which may be a reasonable clergy-view but is also a fairly tongue-in-cheek translation.

At a synagogue I used to attend, the English translation of nora was indeed “terrible.” I knew what the prayerbook meant when it claimed “God’s name is terrible,” but the translation didn’t exactly flow.

Nora does indeed mean terrible, but terrible in terms of “the great and terrible day that heralds the coming of the Lord,” or perhaps a sense of God judging humanity with a terrible mercy. Nora is a perfectly appropriate word in Hebrew, I think. Awe-inspiring, awesome, awe-gaping-stonishing might be appropriate translations of most of the meaning into English, but it’s incomplete without adding a little of the terror of the terrible.

My best shot at translating nora, as it applies to God, is to say that it means thunder on the mountain – where there’s a strange cast to the light, the clouds are large as cities and you can’t decide whether you’d rather stare in rapture or run for cover. (Try finding a simple translation for that.)

The biggest dusty library in the world

There are a few old tomes available on Google Books that talk about Tea. Most of them seem to be missionary publications, which print stories somewhere between the realms of literary journal and dear diary. Happily, it's possible to download these books for free, search quickly for some relevant words and then, if they prove unhelpful, delete the books again with very little expended energy.

Here is a quote about Tea that did tickle my fancy. It comes from My Japanese Year by Thomas Henry Sanders, published by J. Pott &co., 1915.

It would be tedious to give any more details of this ceremony; its purpose being to produce a philosophic calm, it is natural that the description of it does not make very exciting reading; but it is a perfect wonder of quiet graces, of a kind that are not much known among us.  p205

This is a fact about Tea that I have been thinking about myself, particularly in the context of trying to keep a blog on the subject. How to write compellingly about something that one must do to understand? I wish I had an answer; for now I'll continue trying to explore and explain slowly, from the outside in.

Keeping not quite in season

This week, I was going to be ready. Though I have been living out of boxes for a long time and haven't seen my Tea seasonality book in months, I decided it was high time that I come to class with a predetermined poetic name for my chashaku.

The chashaku, or bamboo tea scoop that one used to place powdered tea into the cup, plays a pretty big role in chanoyu. It gets ritually purified before use, then ritually cleaned after, and once most everything else is packed up and put away, the guests get a chance to examine the chashaku and ask a couple questions about it. (They also examine the natsume or tea caddy, but I'm talking about the chashaku right now.)

The last question asked about the chashaku is, "Gomei wa?" or "What is its poetic name?" The name is generally a season word, though it can be a few other things as well, and the season word should match up with the current time of year.