New Decade, Who Dis?

So it's been 7 years, 11 months, and 18 days since my last post here. Glad I got in before the 8 year mark, that would have been embarrassing. While I'm at it, I just also noticed that it has been 10 years, 2 months, 26 days since I started this blog. In either event, so much about my life has changed in that decade but we'll get to that in time.

For the time being the thing that is bringing me back to this blog is my Judaism. If the majority of my early posts here are any indication, I generally used this as a place to discuss my ongoing journey into Judaism. I've recently started back on the path of observance and needed a place to journal about it. As usual, I'd rather keep names and specific locations out of the mix to protect the innocent but the topics here don't quite fit the other blogs I maintain.

That all said, I don't know how much I'll be writing here but it will be a work in process.

Hey, Whadya Read?

I was looking at my daily blog roll this morning and started thinking about why I read who I read. Hirhurim is actually the reason I found the Jewish Blogosphere to begin with. I "met" Gil Student online years ago when my wife (who wasn't my wife at the time) had started her conversion process (after about a year of me trying to talk her out of it). She found an online community on the Delphi Forums and introduced me to online Judaism. After my time in the military I lost contact with the folks on those forums as my life was in a state of upheaval, but one day I logged in and started posting with folks, trying to see what had been happening to everyone in the three or four years since I had written to them last. That's when another friend of mine sent me a link to Gil's new "blog".

Hirhurim is definitely the deep end of the pool for me. I'm always interested in what he has to say, but I don't always understand it. From there I started looking around for more Jewish blogs. That's when I discovered that JewFAQ had an associated blog called "Jewish in a Gentile World". We had used JewFAQ many times in the past for research as we added new rituals and observance into our home and it was a nice resource. As I scanned around blogger I found a couple links to "Dry Bones" by Yaakov Kirschen. I had read Dry Bones for years in other online sources, but now I had a steady source.

As I continued to search around I ran into the others from various links in blogs I would read or searches I would make. I found "On the Fringe - Al Tzitzit" by Shira Salamone while searching for a Conservative viewpoint. From there I found links referenced in various posts that took me to such exciting places as Orthomom, Psychotoddler, and Seraphic Secret. Seraphic Secret brought back old memories when I finally realized that the blog was posted by Robert J. Avrech who wrote one of my favorite movies from a very tough time in my life.

I was living in the Deep South and feeling very alien and alone when "A Stranger Among Us" came out. It was something Jewish to grasp onto and connect with (even if it wasn't my flavor of Judaism at the time). When I went to boot camp three years later, it was one of the movies we watched on Sunday mornings during our chapel time. Just to explain that one, we had our primary services on base on Friday evenings, but then on Sunday mornings since everyone else would be in their religious services we would meet again and daven Shacharit and then spend the rest of the time watching a movie with a Jewish theme and discuss it. The movies ranged from the "Fievel" movies to "Gentleman's Agreement" and it was a great time.

So several of my links have a long personal history to them and some of them I've only recently found and enjoy reading every morning. But I always keep an eye open for new blogs to add to the list and either get a new viewpoint or find someone I agree with.