Shir Hadash will be bringing in a new Assistant Rabbi in July, and the first candidate visited today. She held two teaching sessions, and I was at both of them.

I was a bit out of place at the first session, which was part of a continuing series about Nashim: Remarkable Jewish Women. The series is always open to everyone; the only men there today were Rabbi Nico, our Temple President, and me (I think that’s two more men than usually attend). Our candidate led the session and took us through some of what the Talmud says about Beruriah; she sparked a lot of discussion and I learned a lot.

The second session was a short Torah Study and informal discussion with the Board; she talked about social justice and the interesting coincidence that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s initials, MLK, are also the root for the Hebrew word for “king”, melech (מלך). Again, I learned a lot and really enjoyed meeting her.

We have another candidate coming on Saturday evening; I’m looking forward to meeting him, too.

I’m glad I’m not on the selection committee.

I was really happy about my score for the final running of the Almaniac when I got the answer booklet – I thought I had only missed one question of 81, and I was pretty sure I had earned a trophy (I didn’t see a footnote which affected the answer for the one question I missed).

So I was crushed when I got the final result booklet and found that I’d missed two questions and wasn’t getting a trophy after all. I asked the Old Maltese to rescore my submission and got a prompt response.

The final question on the Almaniac requires you to add up the last digits of the page on which you’d found the answers for questions 5, 15, and so on. Easy – the sum was 48. And I wrote 8 on my scoresheet – the last digit of the answer, not the actual answer. Which was wrong, and cost me a trophy.

Oh, well – I still have a plaque from my best previous finish in 1993!