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#ThowbackThursday: Converts, Cheesecake, and Other Reasons To Like Shavuot

May 21, 2015 by Patrick Beaulier

My Letterman-style Top Ten Reason To Love Shavuot:

10. Cheesecake Brownies. It’s like shooting heroine and cocaine at the same time..only a lot healthier and legal. Dairy and Shavuot go hand-in-hand, and since I seldom eat meat this holiday glorifies everything I love that makes me fat.

9. You get to remember who Ruth is. Ruth is the national symbol of Jewish feminists. I kinda wish we read her megillah instead of Esther’s: instead of booing Hamen, we’d be applauding the Moabite.

8. Everyone stays up late studying Torah. Or just rockin’ the kiddush. If you’re an early to bed, early to rise type, just read our backlog of Shavuot articles.

7. Converts get some respect…for about six hours. On Shavuot, you’re the most Jewish person in the room…even if you were born with the name Christopher Jesusman. And converts are generally the only people who know what Shavuot is in liberal circles, so you get to feel like some kind of tzadik for your intense knowledge.

6. Work restriction. This year is the best because it falls middle of the week, then it’s over, then it’s Shabbat. It’s like taking a week off, since you mentally check out from work a day before any holiday anyway.

5. It has that kinda made-up feeling. Shavuot is a fairly minhag heavy holiday, in the sense that Ruth, studying and milchig is pretty much all there is to it and the rest is just customs to fill in the time. I like that because you never have to worry about doing the wrong thing on Shavuot. Hanukkah is like that, too.

4. Weird conversations. I like Shavuot chavrutah with eccentric people, because the combo of staying up late and heavy religious discussion always goes in strange directions: people passing out, talking in their sleep, stoner-like debates about whether or not Boaz’s foot was actually a foot or a euphemism for…ya know…the male part.

3. Energy drinks. When I was in the rockabilly punk band The Love Drunks, I used to slam energy drinks laced with vodka. I found the combination helped me stay up really late, and mellow out at the same time. I’m not into that kinda thing anymore, but Shavuot is my one time a year where I gorge myself on Red Bull.

2. The diversity of Jewish events. If you really want to pull an all day and all nighter, find a small child and force them to chaperone you to a Chabad family event. The ice cream sundaes are always incredible. In the afternoons you can generally find some JCC-type of place doing a late afternoon event catching after school/before dinner crowd, and then you can party with the grown ups all night.

1. The Torah!!!!!!!!!!! Come on, forget all that cultural junk. It’s all about the Torah, people.

Filed Under: Community Member Blogs, Random (Feelin' Lucky?), Shabbat & Holidays Tagged With: book of ruth, Chabad, cheesecake brownies, conversion to judaism, convert to judaism, darshan yeshiva, energy drinks, minhagim, online conversion, patrick "aleph" beaulier, patrick aleph, punktorah, rabbi beaulier, rabbi patrick aleph beaulier, shavuos, shavuot, ten commandments, the love drunks

The Death of Lenny’s (or Can I Say Kaddish For A Dive Bar In Atlanta?)

December 10, 2013 by Patrick Beaulier

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Image taken from Creative Loafing

Once upon a time, long before I was a rabbi and a blogger, I was the 23 year old singer for a crappy rockabilly-punk band. Actually, we weren’t crappy. We were amazing. But that’s not the point.

The first show I ever played was at a bar called Lenny’s. It was a dive in the true sense. Crazies, biker guys and of course, hipsters, crammed in a grafittied hole in the middle of Memorial Drive, which was like fly paper for people who want to stick you with sharp objects in return for spare change. It was the venue every city has, the place in the “seedy” side of town where every band gets their first gig, where the audiences don’t give a damn and the PBR is somehow tasty.

Like my old band, the venue shut down. But every day, I pass by its boarded up remains on my way to the PunkTorah office in Grant Park. I have this meditation I do when I see the place: taking a deep breath, I imagine all the memories I had there and at other venues like it when I was young. naive and full of hope, and I take those memories and I swallow them into myself, like I’m absorbing my past that’s evaporating away, and it gives me a shield of armor.

But now Lenny’s is slated for demolition. No more drive-by-reminisence.

Now I find myself with a new meditation, reciting a line of Lamentations (Eicha), a beautiful, sorrowful poem about the destruction of the Temple: “The Lord has rejected His altar, He has abolished His Sanctuary, He has delivered into the hand of the enemy the walls of her palaces” (Lam. 2:7).

Lenny’s was not an altar to anything (at least, anything worth worshiping), but the words of Eicha still resonate. When it gets torn down and turned into a condo complex with studios starting at the low low price of $400,000, would it be proper to rend my garments or sit on ashes in sack cloth? Can you say Kaddish for your memories, even if they are through rose colored glasses?

Rabbi Patrick Aleph is the director of PunkTorah. He was in The Love Drunks, Can!!Can, and now he’s in the band Air Wolves. He wants to be your friend on Facebook.

Filed Under: Community Member Blogs Tagged With: convert to judaism, convert to judaism online, darshan yeshiva, dottie's bar, lenny's atlanta, lenny's bar, online conversion, patrick "aleph" beaulier, patrick aleph, punktorah, rabbi beaulier, rabbi patrick aleph beaulier, the love drunks

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