You don’t have to be a PC expert to be a messianic rabbi, but it helps. I learned this when my rabbi recently ordered and built from the ground up a brand new PC for me to use at my workspace last week. The one I was using was running out of hard drive space … fast.
The new one has 1.4 TB of hard disc; it should last a year or two! One of the components he installed is that hot nVidia 8600 GT video card I want for my own Acer Aspire at home.
What a HUGE card it is; it even has its own cooling fan built into the card.
Anyway, graphic card aside, the only hiccup we ran into is that Vista with service pack 1 didn’t get along with our old Corel Presentations software anymore, so we had to switch all our service overheads over to Microsoft Power Point.
Other than being more up-to-date, it’s not a big issue, except for the time frame I had to work in to get everything converted over. It was a tight squeeze, but I made it and the worst thing that happened is that I forgot to update one overhead slide from what it said a week ago to what it needed to say this past week.
All in all, it would be hard to imagine a PC switch going much more smoothly.
At 41, I sometimes wonder if I’m already having memory troubles. I mean, I know what time it is generally, even though I can’t read it to you off a Parmigiani watch; or I can make great connections of disperate facts fairly often still … but sometimes it takes a bit longer than I wish it did.
Take for example this past Shabbat. Someone asked me if I had mentioned their daughter, who’s not part of my class, in class. I said no because, well, why would I? I have my hands full with the kids in my class.
Well, I was told, some kids heard me say it. I was pretty sure I didn’t. And so the situation was a bit tense when my wife and I headed home.
A couple hours later is when the light bulb over my head turned on. Of course I hadn’t mentioned that person’s daughter in class; but I finally remembered that we had another girl in class who had the same name.
Turned out to be a misunderstanding of who I meant by the kids who heard it. If I’d been a bit quicker on the ball, I could have realized what was going on sooner and cleared the air right away.
I’m pretty sure I could have done that better 10 years ago.
The latest development in the bar and bat mitzvah class that I teach is I recently discovered that shul leadership wanted the kids to be learning some Hebrew, as well as some of the prayers and such that are part and parcel of our order of worship at Kehilat Sar Shalom.
There’s good reason for that; if bar and bat mitzvah class is about preparing preteens to join the adults in the church service, then they need both of those skills in order to be capable of doing so with any sort of understanding about what’s going on.
I inaugerated the order of service lessons last week by teaching them the Ets Chayim blessing, but since my own Hebrew is minimal at best, my co-teacher, Patrice, and I went to one of the members of our congregation who teaches beginning Hebrew and are soliciting her help in coming up with a curriculum.
Patrice has agreed to teach the Hebrew portion of class, which takes pressure off of me and will allow me to focus on the other aspects of the lessons. I will more than likely be learning my alef, bet and chayin right along with the students the first time through. (So far, I have only gotten through learning about half the alef-bet in the past before bogging down and getting lost.)
I expect better results this time, the kind that make a person feel a sense of accomplishment and not like they need to go through drug rehab. It should make for a good time for the kids.
