We had to rush our trip to the Farmers’ Market today to get home for the Shir Hadash Book Club; Diane’s the coordinator and had to handle the Zoom logistics until Rabbi Aron could join in. Today’s book was Jews and Words by Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger. Their thesis is that knowledge of Jewish texts (the Bible and Talmud, especially) is what kept Judaism going after the exile and that it’s still the most important factor today – even for non-believers like them. The discussion was lively.

In the afternoon, we tested our faith by cutting each other’s hair (to be more accurate, Diane cut as much of her own hair as she could see and trusted me to handle the back of her head). We’re still speaking. :-)

And we started watching Ted Lasso this evening – we pulled ourselves away after two episodes.

All in all, a nice and relaxing day.

Happy Diwali! Celebrating the victory of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance seems very timely this year.

This evening, we attended a live concert by Laura Benanti in support of performing art organizations around the country (in our case, Oregon Shakespeare Festival). We’d only seen her as Melania on The Late Show , but that was enough to pique our interest; she’s much more interesting in her own right, and I really enjoyed her singing (especially her 15-minute My Fair Lady). She asked viewers to post a selfie of us enjoying the concert on social media, so here’s ours.