And also much cattle

I decided to go to yesterday's weekly study session at the JCC that I haven't been to in about a year, which explains the burst of Jewish stuff in the past couple posts. For the d'rash at the begging, someone got up to talk about right versus left in the bible, inspired by this book. I'm just happy because she used my favorite verse in the bible, from Jonah 4.11: "...that great city wherein there are six-score thousand people who can not tell their left hand from their right, and also much cattle." +10 points for use of the word chiral, -1 for not knowing its adjective form, chirality.

And what was the first thing I did after I left? I went to a decidely non-kosher hole-in-the-wall restaurant and got two slices of pizza. They were plain cheeze, though. Anyway:

Because I didn't email in advance, I sat in with the larger group of seven who don't have smaller groups of two to four to break off with when we break off after the d'rash. On the one hand, I liked the diverse viewpoints — I was seated between the man who said that, though he was born and went to school in communist Russia, he "managed not to let it hurt [him] much", and the Argentinean who was trying to get a graduate degree in anthropology while teaching Spanish part-time. On the other hand, it was hard to get an amorphous group to discuss meaningfully an amorphous topic.


We were talking about following a judge's decisions "even if he says to you right is left and left is right."


If I wasn't tired of people asking "Is there such thing as an objective reality?" I am now. It doesn't matter, people: just pick something reasonable and move on. If you're proved wrong, change your mind.