My Dog is No Friend of the Jews

I neglected to let you know that our dog Ginn arrived back in Israel with Rachel without incident. This may not seem like an interesting tidbit of information to those of you who don't know Ginn's travel history.

I would like to share another piece of information about Ginn: she's not a religious Jew. In fact, I think she's an anti-semite.

I could have realized this a year ago. I bought a new tallis for myself and gave my son my old one. That very day I went out, and when I returned home, Ginn had jumped on the bookshelf, pulled my tallis down, and chewed several mouth prints out of it.

But I let this incident go. I shouldn't have.

Apparently, a week or so ago Ginn did the same thing to my step-son's tephillin. Now, tephillin are very hard leather boxes covering sacred ritual scrolls. They're pretty hard to damage. You are not supposed to drop them onto the floor; if you do, you pick them up and kiss them.

To protect the boxes from scuff marks, they are kept in hard plastic outer boxes and stored in a cloth bag. Eitan kept the bag on top of his dresser in his room.

Ginn was left in his Eitan's room when he had to go out, but he never suspected that Ginn would be able to get this bag; he never had until then.

Ginn managed not only to get the bag, but to chew through it, unwrap the plastic boxes, chew through the leather down to the parchment. She then chewed up the parchment and vomited it up in several places around the room.

In order to get a clearer picture of this feat, here is an illustration of the mathematics involved:



I could only imagine them taking the parchment to a sofer stam and asking him to fix it: "It's here ... and here and here and here. Just let me wring out the dog saliva and vomit."

And unlike us, she eats kitnyot on Passover.

Yehuda

P.S. BTW, I think I was supposed to write "sin" (not "cos") in that picture.