Over the weekend, the blog was (compared to its usual volume) kind of hammered by traffic. By this I mean page hits in the lower 20s when there wasn’t a link from an SHJ email or Facebook post. (I’m not complaining about overall volume; but I’m a numbers geek, so I know what’s “normal” traffic and what’s not.)
A large number of these hits were from a single visitor, who I think was trying to do a school project.The topic of the paper? Something about Shalom Auslander’s “It’s not Easy Being Supremey”–specifically about what the golems symbolize, what the story says about Auslander’s take on the divine, etc. I mentioned that particular story a couple of months back, because we read it in the IISHJ rabbinical program seminar on the Jewish calendar and liturgy; I’m not even on the first page of hits, but it looks like no one out there has parsed out the story in a way that appears on the first page of search engine hits.
I’m not going to do that, either. For the reader, it’s probably best to work these things out for yourself, but doing so involves some pre-existing knowledge of how Orthodox Judaism operates. So, if you weren’t working on a school project and need some help, feel free to leave a comment. (As part-time faculty at a local university, I’m not going to violate honor code provisions. Sorry)
A Humanistic Jew Goes to Washington 