!!Con and the Shabbat Spice

[joshua0]

For the first time in a while, on Saturday, I made havdalah at home, and it got me back to thinking again about that bizarre connection between what we Jews call “the Shabbat spice” and what I feel is the special thing about !!Cons. On the Sabbath, one gets, in theory, to take a break from their busy day, and all of the obligation to go do all these worldly things, and instead to revel in the sweetness of the day of rest. Jews often refer to this sweetness as if it were a physical thing, the “Shabbat spice”; challah that you buy on Friday tastes better on Saturday because it has the Shabbat spice, and even not-terribly-observant Jews are sometimes known to “smell” it throughout the course of the day. !!Con has that feeling, too: instead of being forced to produce, we get to relish in the sweetness of joy for the sake of joy, and the feeling of being a space with people who want to share that with you for the weekend is very different then the feeling of every other day of the year.

Havdalah — literally, ‘separation’ — is the way we seal off Shabbat, and has evolved over the millenia to a kind of kabbalistic, Messianic thing, starting reasonably with a joyful nigun (a wordless tune), prayers and observation of objects that symbolize the various joys of the Sabbath and the world around us (wine, good-smelling spices, an odd-shaped flame), but shifting at the end to a conclude with an invocation of hope for Elijah the Prophet. It is said that Elijah portends the arrival of Messiah (and all the sweetness that entails, when every day will be perfused with the Shabbat spice) — but for right then, at that moment of closing, we move back into our daily business, with the hope of taking some of that Shabbat sweetness with us into our week. I felt that way acutely at the closing of !!Con West last year, too, almost right down to the Messianic hope that maybe this time, when I go back into the world around me, my day to day world of computing will be as sweet as !!Con is.

I wonder what the words are for that feeling around !!Con, the analogue to “the Sabbath spice”, where for a moment we get to pretend that everything is that much closer to the way we want it to be.

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You can help me find out. The !!Con West 2020 Call for Talk Proposals is open through Sunday, December 8th. We'd love to hear about your idea for a 10-minute lightning talk about the joy, excitement, and surprise of computing. You don't have to be an experienced speaker (actually, some of my favorite talks were by speakers whose first public talk was at a !!Con!), but you do have to get a proposal in by the deadline! I'm hoping to see you there.