Spent

It was an incredible day. I fasted the whole day, and though my stomach let me know in no uncertain terms that this wasn't the best of ideas (let's just say I spent a long time paying for it about 1 this afternoon), I feel great now, after a wonderful dinner.
When you do something like this, and spend a whole day at synagogue, you go through several stages. In the first one, you're fully awake, senses primed by an edge of hunger. About noon, you begin to get loggy. I fell asleep during the sermon, the one time I knew I wasn't going to be called on to sing. It seemed to me by looking out into the audience from the choir that I wasn't the only one with this urge. After the morning service, I went to a fascinating lecture by Irwin Chamerinsky (sp?) who is the new dean of UCI's law school and a new member of the synagogue. He spoke about the topic Are We Losing Our Freedoms? In short, he answered this question in the affirmative and very very specifically. What he said was alarming.
We all know in the abstract about Guantanamo and wiretapping and torture and eroding separations of church and state, among other things, but he has been in court recently on all of these topics, as one of the most respected constitutional lawyers around. His words on how the current Supreme Court has pulled out the constitutional rug from under us woke me up really fast.
He plans to help the members of the synagogue get involved in letter writing and other campaigns to help get some of these rights back by talking our congresspeople into overturning some of these decisions.
The most bizarre argument he discussed was Scolea's (sp) justification for overturning the separation of Church and State. The amendment, called the establishment clause, discusses the idea that the US government cannot establish a state religion. But the way the current guys on the court view this is that it means specifically that they cannot set up a church and put a preacher into it, making it the official church of this country. If they do anything short of this, they are not violating the clause.
In the same way, prisoners at Guantanamo are not being allowed to pray the requisite number of times per day or to have non-pork meals because the regulations at the prison does not make accomodations for this. Since, according to the court, the regulations were not specifically intended to restrict religious rights, they are allowable.
There was lots more.He spoke for a long time, without notes, and answered questions for a long time too.
Then I took part in a women's Torah interpretation group. That was interesting for me of course. I learned a lot.
Finally, we went back to afternoon service, getting out about 6:15.
The music was amazing and again, it was great to be with people in the choir, who I really enjoy and respect, as well as lots of interesting and intelligent people in the community at large.