Just finished taping a fun interview on The Jewish Channel TV, where I was interviewed by Steven I. Weiss for the show "The Week in Review." My appearance should be on next week, and then available on demand for a month. You can also see it on TJCTV.com.
I’m writing this from a stranger’s home in Lido Beach [south shore Long Island] NY. I’m on day 3 of my 22 day, 22 venue, 6 state East Coast book tour. I spent the last two nights at the home of Rabbi Robin Fryer Brozdin, who happened to be one of the women arrested in Israel recently for praying at the Kotel/Western Wall.
Those who have followed my blog for a long time may recall that I was privileged to davan with the Women of the Wall in December 2006. It was an incredibly moving experience, especially since I was honored with an aliyah. We had our Torah service at the south end of the Western Wall, near Davidson’s Arch, using a giant flat rock that had once been part of the wall as our table to read Torah from. I thought at the time that if there could only be a way to enlarge the Kotel to include this area, which was obviously a continuation of the same holy wall, then there should be room for all Jews to pray there in their own way. Of course it would have to be open to the public, free of charge, 24/7, just as the Kotel currently is. But this was just an idea.
Now I hear that my idea is not just my idea alone. When Natan Sharansky was charged with finding a way to solve the “problem” of women wanting to read Torah at the Kotel, he can up with the same solution.
Now will it work? Can all the sides agree to it, including the Muslims who contract the Temple Mount and the archaeologists
who control the Davidson Arch area? Can the Israeli government actually find the money and the resolve to make it happen? Who knows? It will probably take a miracle, but hey, miracles happen there.
Last post I mentioned that I was dealing with “personal stuff.” Now that my son-in-law has gone public with his testicular cancer battle on Google+, I can share what has been occupying me since mid-February. Thankfully, much of my support has involved spending time with my grandsons, although Gary's week of chemo coinciding with Pesach was a definite bummer. For the full story, see this link.
Just after I apologized for waiting almost 2 weeks between posts, I’ve now taken even longer. Yes I’ve been traveling and dealing with personal stuff [as Nachmanides says, “those who understand will understand”], but I’ve actually been working on Volume 2 of “Rav Hisda’s Daughter.”
The first draft is up to seventeen chapters, my hero and heroine are finally married, and my challenge at this point is how to condense 50 years of their life together into a manageable number of pages. Obviously I will have to skip entire swaths of years, or summarize them into a few paragraphs, so I can concentrate on the high points. Yet I don’t want to give short shrift to the important stuff, plus there are many interesting Talmud passages that mention my characters that I’d really like to include. I’d rather not write 1000 pages and then cut 500 of them, like I ended doing for the first volume of “Rashi’s Daughters.” I would hope that by this point I’d have developed better writing skills. At a minimum I need to reread some historical novels where the author has covered a lot of ground without detailing every year, or better yet, every decade.