Plague!

Things got a bit biblical here yesterday when we experienced a plague of lice. Well, actually, Alec mainly experienced the plague as I was a shul during the worst of it and he managed to get rid of the worst of it before I returned home.

The culprits were thrips, an annoying, seemingly pointless tiny insect which sucks the goodness out of food crops, and swarms. With the heat Alec and I have been sleeping with the bedroom window wide open. Happily I didn't bother to look out of the bedroom window as I was getting ready for shul so I left blissfully unaware that the entire area behind the blind was covered in the blighters. Alec, on the other hand, got up after I'd left, went into the living room and opened up the french windows, before looking out the bedroom window and seeing the swarm there. He quickly grabbed the hoover and sucked them up, unaware that even more of them were coming in through the open french windows until he walked into the living room to find thousands of them on the ceiling. So Alec had to close all of the window in the flat to keep them out whilst he proceeded to hoover the ceiling. This morning I tentatively opened one window a bit and we don't appear to have been engulfed in another plague.

Thrips are very annoying, however they have some advantages. They aren't attracted to food, so the shabbat lunch waiting on the kitchen side was fine, although I had a short panic when I thought the pepper in the salad dressing might be thrips. They are attracted to white things and light, so after Alec hoovered most of them up, a lot of the rest could be disposed of by leaving a light on and wiping them all off the lamp with damp cloth. The down side of their fondness for white light things is that MacBooks are a bit of a Mecca to them. So now there are a few thrips which will be staying with us, as they are inside my computer. Two of them are very clearly inside my computer because they got inside the screen and promptly died. Alec helpfully looked at the internet and found that the only way to deal with this would be to send the MacBook back the manufacturer to be disassembled to see if they could get them out. I don't want to bother doing that so for now I have two very dead pixels in my screen.

The JFS case

I might surprise some people by revealing that I am very saddened and angered by the verdict of the Appeals court in the JFS school admissions case.

Some background. JFS is an oversubscribes Orthodox Jewish state school in London. In the UK, state funded faith schools are allowed to give priority to children from their faith communities in their admissions policies. As JFS is very oversubscribed, you can only get in if you're Jewish, and as JFS is an Orthodox school they use an Orthodox definition of who is Jewish. In 2006 a boy applied for the school, whose father was Jewish by Orthodox standards and whose mother had undergone a Conservative conversion. His father enquired about whether it would be possible for the boy to have an Orthodox conversion so that he could go to the school. The London Beth Din replied that conversion would take longer than a year and the boy would not get priority for admissions by virtue of being in the process of conversion. The school was oversubscribed, the boy didn't get into the school. The father appealed but did not win his appeal. He then took the school to court on the grounds of racial discrimination. The school one the case in the High Court, so he appealed and recently won in the Appeals Court. The school, with the backing of the Board of Deputies and the Chief Rabbi, will be appealing the verdict in the House of Lords.

The current policy of JFS means that I would not be able to send my children there, but I am still appalled by the verdict. Lots of people I know are pleased by the verdict because there don't like JFS, for being the epitome of everything which is awful about non-observant 'Orthodox' Anglo-Jewry, the London Beth Din, due to their arsey power politics particularly in the area of conversion, and faith based admission policies. However, the verdict of the Court of Appeal was not about the virtue of the London Beth Din and in my opinion it is worse. What the verdict boils down to, is that the Jewish definition of who is Jewish, is racist. When I say 'Jewish' I mean the definition of Jewishness held by all mainstream Jewish movements. If this verdict is upheld in the Lords it will effect JCOSS's admissions policy just as much as it will effect JFS's. Orthodox, Masorti and Reform Judaism all essentially have the same definition of who is a Jew, they just don't all recognise each other's conversions, but they all agree that you're Jewish if your mother is Jewish or you convert. The Court of Appeal have declared that this definition of who is Jewish is racist, and Jewish schools must instead use a Christian based definition of who is Jewish based upon religious practice. I'm not sure how exactly they propose to measure this. Presumably, as we're already applying Christian standards of religiosity let's go the whole hog, they're going to use synagogue attendance. Never mind that Judaism is a home based anarchic religion in which one can live an observant lifestyle without darkening the doors of your local shul too often, Anglican religiosity is often gauged by church attendance, why shouldn't Jews fall into line. Even if school places genuinely did depend upon observance, do we really want children's school places to depend upon whether anyone saw you drive on shabbat or grab a bite to eat from a non-kosher restaurant?

Another thing which annoys me about the case is that the judges are claiming the JFS admissions depend upon whether the child's mother is Jewish. This is blatantly not true. The majority of JFS pupils (possibly all) will have Jewish mothers, but they are there because they are Jewish. I don't know how the London Beth Din does about child conversions, but there are circumstances in which a child might be Jewish independent of his or her mother. If an Orthodox couple adopted a non-Jewish baby, it is usual for an Orthodox Beth Din to be willing to covert the infant, as long as they are satisfied that it will receive an observant upbringing. It is quite common for children to convert at the same time as their parents, it's possible that a widower or divorcee might convert his children with him. I wonder whether there may not be many children there in these circumstances because JFS isn't frum enough to attract Orthodox converts and their children. I rarely agree with the London Beth Din, but I have to say that if I were contacted by someone who'd suddenly decided he wanted his son to convert so that he could get into a particular school, my reply would be similar to theirs. Conversion to Judaism is a serious undertaking. I would hope that most rabbis of any denomination, faced by someone seeking a quicky conversion so blatantly not 'for the sake of Heaven', would, in the nicest outreachy way possible, tell them that they were being completely unreasonable.

Anyway, what's this world where children's admission to policies depend upon the faith of the child rather than that if his or her parents. Children apply to secondary school at the age of 10 or 11. Of all of my friends who've managed to confound their parents by adopting a different religion, I've never met someone who managed it before the age of 10. I think some of the same people who are applauding the JFS case would be appalled if a religious group converted a child that young without their parents' permission. So all faith schools, even the nice C of E ones, are basing their admissions on the religion of the parents rather than the children.

I just don't think that it's racist for a religious minority to stick to their over 2000 year old definition of who is a member of their religion, rather than have to adopt the definition of used by the majority religion. It's not racist that I couldn't have an aliyah until I converted. It's not racist that Alec can't toivel our dishes whereas our bacon loving friend Rob could. Legally imposing the categories of the majority religion upon a religious minority for no good reason, on the other hand, is oppressive.

Technical Jewish question

I'm chanting haftarah for the first time on 1st August. I'm going through the text learning the chant but I've come across a problem. Isaiah 40:5 begins with tipchah munach katon, but the book I'm learning from doesn't say that you can get tipchahs in katon clauses so I don't know how to sing it.

Any ideas?