Recycled

Our Minister’s chat to the children in church this morning included my blip from Friday.

His theme was light and trees. The discussion about the “snow moon” was news to some American friends in the congregation but was used to illustrate the different forms of light on the world.

The tree reference came from the Jewish festival of trees, which if I recall correctly is Tu BiShvat which fell on Friday evening. Our Minister had been invited to take part in a meal to mark the festival, and to speak about the depiction of trees (and vines) in Christianity.

So Friday’s blip combined the 2 themes.

He mentioned that a tradition at the meal he was at was to have a number of glasses (small I hope) of wine throughout the meal to represent the number formed by the first 2 letters of Jesus’ name in Hebrew. I'm no Hebrew scholar so apologies if what follows is not fully correct.

The first letter is ‘Yod’.. The second ‘Hey’. Gematria is a system of assigning numbers to words/ letters etc. Yod is 10. When that is added to Hey (5) you get a grand total of 15 glasses of wine. Hence my concern about the size of the glasses and presumably why just the first 2 letters are deemed sufficient!

Sounds like a good tradition whether true or not!