rear pew mirror • doug brook
The Perfect Dreidel Stuffer It’s time for the triumphant return of our first-ever annual Chanukah Shopping Guide. To make gift-giving decisions simple amid the over-programmed, overloaded shopping season, this guide has exactly one item in it. It’s all anyone will need. With great fanfare — that is, a fair number of ceiling fans were turned on and made the room feel great — the first collection based on this column is now available, in paperback and Kindle. “Rear Pew Mirror: Reflections From the Back of the Sanctuary” contains 29 past columns, all updated with more laughs and fewer typos. Each column has been clinically proven to get laughs out of nearly both of our readers, by virtue of them needing clinical help after reading. It might seem self-serving to focus this shopping guide on this book. In many realms, it would be unthinkable. For example, self-promotion is difficult to get away with in the military. Despite that, we will uniformly discharge our duty, as off we go being all we can be with our anchors aweigh, while turning up our semper hi-fi. This collection includes past columns about holiday mashups, food, biblical sources, culture, and services. Longtime readers can relive the frightful Friday Yom Kippur that brought about Kol Nidre the 13th, or revisit the menu of Italian dishes for the Passover seder which went far beyond matzahroni and cheese. New readers can live or visit them for the first time. Each section of the book is introduced by newly uncovered, related pieces of classic literature. The food section begins with the famous Shakespearean monologue “To eat, or not to eat” from Act Three of “Treiflet.” The services section starts with the lyrYou still have ics to the iconic song from The Man of La Mishnah, “To dream the Shabbat morning to laugh dream…” There’s something for everyone, from sometimes a letter to Superman from the Metropolis Rabbinic Council, to Dr. Seuss’s original, never-proven-to-be-inauthentic, ‘Twas the Night Before Chanukah. You may ask, in these trying times, is it appropriate to laugh? Yes. There’s a story about Rabbi Akiva where, sometime after the destruction of the Second Temple, he and several other rabbis entered Rome. The other rabbis began crying, but Rabbi Akiva started laughing. The other rabbis asked why he was laughing. In true rabbinic form, Rabbi Akiva answered by asking his own question: why were they crying? They asked how could they not cry when these Romans who sacrifice to idols and bow to false gods live happily and securely, while for the rabbis the Second Temple had been destroyed. Rabbi Akiva said that’s why he was laughing. If this is what the Almighty Big G gave to people who anger Him, can you imagine how much more will come to His people? Similarly, Rabbah — a late Third-Century Talmudist — would start his talks with a joke. Of course, he was teaching to a captive audience and didn’t need to win their attention, but starting with a laugh would loosen up his students’ minds to expand their thinking. It gave students permission to approach things differently. So, if you ever need a break from the world, in this book you can revisit last decade’s anomaly known as Thanksnukah, or preview the yet-to-happen happenstance of Chanukippur. But, wait, there’s more. With the release of this book, Rear Pew Mirror is now a triple-threat. There’s the book, the column itself which has been continued on previous page 62
December 2023 • Southern Jewish Life