KtB - Ugandan Jews

[Tiassa]

• Lambert, Blake. "Lugandan Psalms." Killing the Buddha, November 13, 2003. see http://www.killingthebuddha.com/dispatches/Lugandan.htm

So anyway, I thought it was an interesting article. In fact, the 11/13 edition of Killing the Buddha is rather entertaining, including Laurel Snyder's, "To Pardon All Our Fucking Iniquities," which is a bit of a chuckle.

But Lambert's article about Ugandan Jews ... somebody please make a movie out of that. I'm ... not sure I can describe the level of human-interest comedy, even compassionate comedy, that could be built from it:

"The congregation is always comfortable with mostly Lugandan because now the largest number is Lugandan. That is for the old people," Keki told me. "Now when it comes to the youth, they are almost all English. So they are now comfortable with English, a few of them. But now those who had learned English, they go with Hebrew."

If that's the case, then the Abayudaya are the slow learners of Judaism's Diaspora. At times, it sounded to me as if Moses and other participating congregants read the Hebrew Yom Kippur prayers as if they had never seen them before. Some words and sentences gained new pronunciations in their mouths; others merely became unintelligible.

I doubted they even understood what they were saying and what they were doing. What else could have led Moses to call upon me, without warning or practice, to chant the Haftorah?

At any rate, I have no real purpose with this topic. Just putting some material out for folks to read if they want.

What? People think I'm vitriolic? Read Zabotinsky's merciless review of Bukiet. But back to the Ugandan Jews ... um ... yeah. It's an interesting article. Check it out.