Monday, December 13, 2004
Out of here
OK, the move is complete. This blog will continue at http://smontagu.org/blog/. You should be redirected there in 15 seconds.
RSS Changes III
Holy crap, it is just as I feared. The RSS feed has changed its name yet again to http://mountainsmog.blogspot.com/rss/mountainsmog.xml. So anyone reading me by RSS will never know when the blog moves (which will be extremely soon — I'm fed up with this). Goodbye, dear readers, it was nice knowing you.
Sunday, December 12, 2004
Kubanga okusaasira kwe kwa luberera
That's כִּי לְעוֹלָם חַסְדּוֹ, the refrain of Psalm 136 in Luganda, as sung by the Abayudaya community of Uganda. (Thanks to Danya (Jerusalem Syndrome) posting at JewSchool, via Rachel (Velveteen Rabbi)). I have to get this disc!
Almost done
I finished the first draft of the book proposal I'm translating today. I'm glad it's being translated, because it's something I'd love to read, and I would never fight my way all through it in Hebrew.
This blog will be moving soon, since Dreamhost has started offering WordPress as part of the service.
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
Some news stories
America Online on Tuesday said it has laid off 50 employees involved in Web browser development at its Netscape Communications subsidiary amid a reorganization of its Mozilla open-source browser team …
The layoffs come as the loose Mozilla.org group, which had overseen the open-source development efforts of the Mozilla browser, transforms itself into a nonprofit foundation.
The Mozilla Foundation has released version 1.0 of its Firefox browser, an open-source product that has generated lofty expectations that it will offer real competition to Microsoft's ubiquitous Internet Explorer.
A preview release of the Firefox browser available since last month has been downloaded over eight million times, the Mozilla Foundation says in a press release this week.
Firefox 1.0 is available in 12 languages for Microsoft's Windows, Apple Computer's Mac OS X, and Linux. The product can be obtained through Mozilla's Web site as a free download or in CD format with a user's manual for $14.95.
The result of an open-source project, Firefox became a reality "thanks to the tireless efforts of hundreds of community volunteers and developers around the world," the Mozilla Foundation says.
AOL revealed on Monday that it has begun a widespread restructuring into four distinct operating units, each with its own budget. In the wake of this reorganization, the company also has announced the departure of three high-level executives.
בּוֹר כָּרָה וַיַּחְפְּרֵהוּ וַיִּפֹּל בְּשַׁחַת יִפְעָל ׃
יָשׁוּב עֲמָלוֹ בְרֹאשׁוֹ וְעַל קָדְקֳדוֹ חֲמָסוֹ יֵרֵד ׃
אוֹדֶה יְהוָה כְּצִדְקוֹ וַאֲזַמְּרָה שֵׁם־יְהוָה עֶלְיוֹן ׃
Monday, November 08, 2004
Water from the wells of salvation
I wasn't going to blog about the US election, but this was just too interesting to pass by.
First of all, correlating county-by-county election returns with geographical data from the Tiger database is just so superbly geeky. Secondly, it struck me that there's a very strong correlation between voting Democrat and living near large bodies of water. Look how the blue clusters along the Pacific coast and round the Great Lakes. Even in the Midwest, which is solidly red in a state-by-state map, the nearer a county is to the Mississippi the bluer it gets.
The Gulf of Mexico looks like an exception to the rule — if you look at Texas, the Rio Grande side has far more Democrats than the Gulf side, and the Atlantic coast of Florida is bluish where the Gulf coast is reddish (Note to self: you already used the "You don't look bluish" line in a blog title. Don't repeat yourself, especially since you stole it from Yellow Submarine in the first place). New Mexico is an exception in the other direction, and so are parts of South Dakota (or is that the line of the Missouri?)
Tuesday, November 02, 2004
Making myself useful
It's good that the remnants of a classical education that I carry around with me sometimes come in useful for me and other people.
My ever loving wife is winding up her M.A. thesis on Eve and Mary in Irenæus of Lyons, and it's my privilege to help her as computer and language dogsbody, looking up references on the internet, translating parts of the Latin text (the only complete version extant) of Adversus Hæreses and of the surviving fragments of the Greek original and the French commentary by Rousseau (or is it Massuet or Migne? I get a bit vague about the bibliographical details). I draw the line at Armenian, but I did have a stab at a Syriac fragment a little while ago. Syrian isn't hard once you decipher the alphabet: you just pretend it's Aramaic and take it from there. Hey, it worked for Mel Gibson.
My Latin is a whole lot more fluent than my Greek, either because I started learning it two years earlier or because it's an easier language and with more cognates to English, or just because the Latin translation of AH is very elementary Latin. In Greek I am always running to Liddell and Scott, but in Latin I hardly need a dictionary, which is lucky, because I don't own one.
Yesterday I even had the chutzpah to express an opinion about the content, and the greater chutzpah to think I knew better than Migne (or, as it might be, Massuet). In AH IV. 33, 4, Irenæus says "… how shall he (man) escape from the generation subject to death, if not by means of a new generation, given in a wonderful and unexpected manner (but as a sign of salvation) by God — [I mean] that regeneration which flows from the virgin through faith?".
Now, Massuet (or, such as it may be, Migne) says that the "virgin" here must be the Church because only the Church, and not Mary, can be described as giving birth to all believers, but I beg to disagree. The whole thrust of Irenæus' doctrine of Eve and Mary in the passages I've been reading seems to be that Mary replaces Eve as אם כל חי: Eve is only our mother in the flesh, and made us inherit death by her disobedience, but Mary by accepting God's will in faith becomes the mother of all the human race on a spiritual level and restores us to life — "regeneration which flows from the virgin through faith".
OK, I've got that out of my system, we will now return to the usual blend of Judaism and software internationalisation.
Sunday, October 24, 2004
Stopgap Post
I haven't been getting to the blog lately. I'm gainfully employed again (contracting for the Hebrew Competence Group at IBM until the end of the year, with hopes for renewal of the contract for a longer period) and when I get home and finish checking email, reading other people's blogs, and hacking here and there on Mozilla, I don't seem to have time and energy left to write, not to mention work on the chapter of a book I'm supposed to be translating by the middle of October.
This means I have quite a backlog of things I wanted to blog about and haven't. Watch this space for "Naming of Parts", "Whumping Willows", and "Zgodno u standardima".
Wednesday, October 13, 2004
I can't believe I did this
Well, it should at least increase my geek credibility
Sunday, October 03, 2004
Two Rebbetzins
Welcome Renegade Rebbetzin, a rising star in the blogosphere, and talking of rebbetzins, check out an article in Ha'aretz about an old friend of mine, Amichai Lau-Lavi.
Thursday, September 30, 2004
RSS Changes II
I emailed Blogger support and they changed the RSS feed URI manually back to http://mountainsmog.blogspot.com/rss/MountainSmog.xml. The problem is that my <link> element, which uses a <$BlogSiteFeedURL$> tag (following their instructions) still points to http://mountainsmog.blogspot.com/rss/mountainsmog.xml, and I strongly suspect, without daring to make the experiment, that if I make any other changes to the feed settings it will go back to writing to that file. I explained this to them, and asked if they could solve the problem by making a symmlink, and they responded
I would suggest that you change the <$BlogSiteFeedURL$> tag in your template to the actual link, http://mountainsmog.blogspot.com/rss/MountainSmog.xml since we cannot assign both of these filenames to your account.
I don't get it: the status quo is that both files exist, they aren't about to allocate one to another user, and changing one to be a symmlink to the other would actually save them disk space. Things like this make me want to install Moveable Type or Wordpress or something so I can be in control of my own settings, and so does the fact that I am typing this whole post a second time after it vanished into limbo when I tried to publish it the first time. Do any of my six readers have any relevant experience or advice?
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Quid "ille" significat
Thanks to Talmida for the pointer to Speculative Grammarian, which I think is the best online linguistics magazine ever. My favourite article so far: "The Original Language of Winnie-the-Pooh".
Monday, September 27, 2004
Hebrew Haikus
I couldn't resist this challenge on a mailing list I subscribe to. As someone pointed out there, a haiku should be about nature or seasons, otherwise it's a senryu.
אֲסַפֵּר לִבְנִי
עַל יְצִיאַת מִצְרָיִם
בְּחוֹדֶשׁ אָבִיב
פָּך שֶׁמֶן אֶחָד
נָתַן אוֹרוֹ בְּחוֹרֶף
לִשְׁמוֹנָה יָמִים
שֶׁבַע הֲקָפוֹת
עֲרָבוֹת בְּעוֹז חוֹבְטִים
גֶּשֶׁם לִבְרָכָה
Thursday, September 23, 2004
Nearly Yom Kippur
If I was capable, I would translate this into English. I've tried many times to translate Agnon, but I just can't capture it.
השמים היו טהורים והארץ היתה שקטה וכל הרחובות היו נקיים, ורוח חדשה היתה מפרפרת בחללו של
עולם. ואני תינוק כבן ארבע הייתי ומלובש הייתי בגדי מועד, ואיש אחד מקרובי הוליכני אצל אבי
ואצל זקני לבית התפילה, ובית התפילה היה מלא עטופי טליתות ועטרות כסף בראשיהם ובגדיהם בגדי
לבן ובידיהם ספרים, ונרות הרבה תקועים בתיבות ארוכות של חול, ואור מופלא עם ריח טוב יוצא
מן הנרות. ואיש זקן עומד מוטה לפני התיבה וטליתו יורדת עד למטה מלבו וקולות ערבים ומתוקים
יוצאים מטליתו. ואני עומד בחלון בית התפילה מרעיד ומשתומם על הקולות הערבים ועל עטרות הכסף
ועל האור המופלא ועל ריח הדבש היוצא מן הנרות נרות השעוה. ודומה היה לי שהארץ שהלכתי עליה
והרחובות שעברתי בהם וכל העולם כולו אינם אלא פרוזדור לבית זה. עדיין לא הייתי יודע להגות
במושגים עיוניים ואת המושג הדרת קודש לא הכרתי. אבל אין ספק בלבי שבאותה שעה הרגשתי בקדושת
המקום ובקדושת היום ובקדושת האנשים העומדים בבית ה' בתפילה ובניגונים. ואף על פי שעד לאותה
השעה לא ראיתי דבר כזה לא עלה על דעתי שיש הפסק לדבר. וכך הייתי עומד ומביט על הבית ועל
האנשים שעמדו בבית, ולא הבחנתי בין אדם לאדם, שכולם כאחד עם כל הבית כולו דומים היו
עלי כחטיבה אחת. ושמחה גדולה היתה בלבי ולבי נדבק באהבה לבית זה ולאנשים אלו ולניגונים
אלו. על יד על יד פסקו הניגונים, ועדיין בת קול היתה מנהמת עד שפסקה אף היא. נתקמטה
נפשי פתאום וגעיתי בבכייה גדולה. אבי וזקני נתחלחלו ושאר כל העם עמדו עלי לפייסני. ואני
דמעותי מתגלגלות והולכות מתוך הבכייה. אלו לאלו שואלים, מי גרם לתינוק שיבכה? ואלו לאלו
משיבים, מי יודע.
עתה אספר מי גרם לי שאבכה. אותה שעה שנפסקה התפילה נפסקה פתאום אותה חטיבה נאה. מקצת מן
האנשים הורידו טליתותיהם מעל ראשיהם ומקצתם התחילו מסיחים זה עם זה. אותם שאהבתי נדבקה
בהם החליפו פניהם פתאום והשחיתו את דמותם הנאה ואת דמות הבית ודמות היום. ועל זה היה דוה לבי ועל זה געיתי בבכייה.
כמה שנים יצאו ועדיין אותה השתוממות מופקדת בלבי. וכשם שהיא מופקדת בלבי כך שמור בלבי
אותו הצער. וכל שנה ושנה ביום הכיפורים כשאני רואה אנשים מישראל "כולם צנים לובן מוצעפים,
לאדרך בשרפים עפים", מחליפים פנים של חילוי בפנים של חולין נפשי מתקמטת כבאותו היום.
S. Y. Agnon, Introduction to "Days of Awe"
Sunday, September 19, 2004
Ideas for teaching liturgy
I realized during Rosh Hashana services last week that Aviad doesn't know half as much as I had assumed that he did about the structure of the Mahzor. The middle of the silent Amida wasn't a very helpful time to realize this, but I gave him a whispered overview of Malchuyot Zichronot and Shofarot before the repetition while resolving to do the job properly in the time remaining before his Bar Mitzvah.
So … I have been trying to think up a lesson plan, and had the idea of approaching it as a system of cycles, something like this:
- Three times a day: the Amidah
- Sources: the patriarchs vs. the Temple services
- Structure and content
- First three blessings
- Middle thirteen blessings
- Last three blessings
- Live example: Minha
- Parshat haTamid and Pitum haKetoret
- Ashrei
- Kaddish as liturgical punctuation
- Amida
- Tahanun
- Alenu
- Twice a day: the Shema
- Sources
- Structure and content
- Live example: Arvit
- Blessings before the Shema
- Shema
- Blessings after the Shema
- Amida
- Alenu
- Every Monday and Thursday: weekday Torah reading
- Sources
- Live example: Shahrit
- Morning blessings and readings
- Pesukei deZimra
- Blessings before the Shema
- Shema
- Blessings after the Shema
- Amida
- Tahanun
- Torah reading
- Alenu
- Once a week: Shabbat
- Shabbat forms of the Amida, including Musaf
- First three blessings
- Middle blessing
- Last three blessings
- Other extras
- Kabbalat Shabbat
- Expanded Pesukei deZimra
- Minha Torah reading
- Havdala
- Shabbat forms of the Amida, including Musaf
- Once a month: Rosh Hodesh
- Ya'ale veyavo
- Hallel
- Torah reading
- Musaf
- Birkat haLevana and Kiddush Levana
- Four times a year: public fast days
- Selihot
- Anenu and Nahem
- Torah reading
- Three times a year: Pilgrim Festivals
- Festival forms of the Amida, including Musaf
- First three blessings
- Middle blessing
- Last three blessings
- Other extras
- Hallel
- Torah reading
- Hosha'anot
- Special festival services
- Seder
- Tikkun Leil Shavu'ot
- Tikkun Hosha'ana Rabba
- Festival forms of the Amida, including Musaf
- Once a year: High Holidays
- Selihot
- Shofar
- Rosh haShana Musaf
- Yom Kippur Amidot
- Ne'ila
- Once a year: Minor Festivals
- Purim and Hanukka
- Al haNissim
- Hallel
- Megillat Esther
- Others
- Tu biShvat
- Lag Ba'omer
- Tu beAv
- Purim and Hanukka
- Every now and then: life-cycle events
I don't know if this approach would work for everybody, but I'm sure it would have worked for me when I was a kid, and I suspect it will work for Aviad too.
Saturday, September 18, 2004
RSS changes
For those using the RSS feed, I have been fiddling with the settings, and the most notable result seems to be that the URI has changed from http://mountainsmog.blogspot.com/rss/MountainSmog.xml to http://mountainsmog.blogspot.com/rss/mountainsmog.xml. Apologies if this has inconvenienced anybody.
For calendar geeks
Hat-tip to Avraham Bronstein for the link to “How is this year different from all other years?” Sample quotation:
This year 5765 is the only year in all of history whose “keviut” (year-type determination) involves dechiyyat BeTU-TaKPaT at the end of the year, and whose Pesach falls on April 24.
The "exercise for the reader" in section M.7 has been bothering me: "There is one other situation [apart from Shushan Purim on Shabbat] where the same haftara can be read on two consecutive Shabbatot. Figure out what it is." The only answer I can think of is rather contrived: an ethnically mixed congregation does Sephardi and Ashkenazi readings on alternate weeks, and so reads "ועמי תלואים למשובתי" for Parshat Vayyetze on a Sephardi week, and then reads it again for Parshat Vayyishlah on Ashkenazi week.
Tuesday, September 14, 2004
Eyeopener
In the Torah reading for the first day of Rosh Hashana, Hagar and Ishmael have been sent off into the desert and have run out of water. Hagar sits crying, out of sight of her son so as not to see him die. She has given up hope.
At this point, just as in the story of the Akeda in the reading for the next day (why does nobody ever seem to make anything of the parallels between the two stories? A topic for another drash), the deus ex machina appears and saves their lives.
וַיִּפְקַח אֱלֹהִים אֶת עֵינֶיהָ וַתֵּרֶא בְּאֵר מָיִם וַתֵּלֶךְ וַתְּמַלֵּא אֶת הַחֵמֶת מַיִם וַתַּשְׁקְ אֶת הַנָּעַר
And God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water; and she went, and filled the bottle with water, and gave the lad drink.
What exactly happened with this well? The commentaries are mostly silent, but I see 3 possibilities.
- A well miraculously appears. This seems to be implied by Bereshit Rabba 53, 14 where the angels challenge God to justify why he is raising up a well for Ishmael, whose descendants would deny water to the exiles from Jerusalem, according to midrashim on Isaiah 21, 13. (If you were wondering, the answer is that God only judges people as they are at the present moment, also a topic for another drash)
- God gives Hagar some kind of supernatural perception, or dowsing ability, which enables her to discover a hidden well. Seforno's commentary is saying either this or the next possibility:
- The well was there all the time and Hagar only notices it when God points it out. (I imagine her even sitting on the edge of the well or tripping over it without realizing, rather like Mole on Badger's door-scraper in The Wind in the Willows.) She had been so absorbed in her problems that she wasn't letting herself see the solution to them which was right in front of her face.
I had a similar eyeopener this week. I discovered, after 15 years of thinking it was beyond my abilities, that by acting according to a few simple principles I can increase the happiness of the person whose happiness is most important to me out of all proportion to the effort required. What a New Year's present for us both!
How many deaths will it take?
Every terrorist attack brings its own horrid variations on the same old tragedy.
On the news tonight we heard someone describe how he had been sitting next to the suicide bomber for part of the bus journey until he had given up his seat to a woman and moved to the back of the bus. With his voice shaking, he described how he had seen the same woman lying dead in the bus, and how hard it was to come to terms with the fact that if he hadn't given her his seat she wouldn't have been sitting right next to the explosion.
Monday, August 30, 2004
I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine
As far as I know (and I would love to be corrected) Ellul is the only Hebrew month which has Midrash on its name. The one that everybody remembers is the notarikon
אני לדודי ודודי לי
from Song of Songs 6, 3, but there are several more. That one itself is part of a set of three verses with an acrostic אלול, and the other two are Deuteronomy 30, 6:
ומל יהוה אלהיך את לבבך ואת לבב זרעך
and Esther 9,22:
משלח מנות איש לרעהו ומתנות לאבינים
so the three verses together point us to תפילה, תשובה וצדקהת: prayer, repentance and charity, and those lead us to redemption in Isaiah 59, 20:
ובא לציון גואל ולשבי פשע ביעקב.
Why do I mention all this? Not because I've decided to turn this into a preachy blog, nor even because I was looking for a context where I could use the word "hermeneutics" without seeming too contrived, but because I was musing about different kinds of exegesis. Of the four streams that make up the Pardes ? Peshat, Remez, Drash and Sod ? these are firmly in the category of Remez. That can sometimes appear as superficial wordplay (though always a lot of fun for a crossword addict like myself), and one could ask, if this is valid Midrash, why aren't Bible Codes valid Midrash too?
I think the answer is that we judge Midrash not by how it's done, but by how edifying the results are. Bible codes, depending on where you find them, seem to reduce the Torah either to the level of Nostradamus or to an immensely boring directory of scholars.
There are many places in the Midrash where an overenthusiastic darshan, often Rabbi Meir, gets rapped on the knuckles by his colleagues for letting himself reach a politically incorrect conclusion. For example, Shir Hashirim Rabba on Song of Songs 2, 4:
ר' מאיר אומר אמרה כנסת ישראל הושלט בי יצר הרע כיין ואמרתי לעגל אלה אלהיך ישראל … אמר לו ר' יהודה דייך מאיר אין דורשין שיר השירים לגנאי אלא לשבח שלא ניתן שיר השירים אלא לשבחן של ישראל.
Rabbi Meir interpreted the phrase "he led me to the house of wine" as if the community of Israel were saying "the evil inclination overpowered me like wine and I worshipped the Golden Calf as the God of Israel." Rabbi Judah said to him "Hold it right there, Meir! We don't interpret the Song of Songs as blame, only as praise, since the Song of Songs was only given in praise of Israel."
Why do all translations of Midrash into English come out sounding so lame?
Thursday, August 26, 2004
Aramaic Watch
Welcome Naomi Chana to my sidebar. Baraita is the first blog I've come across apart from this one with an Aramaic title, and it's totally compulsive reading.
Firefox 1.0
Reading some of the controversy surrounding recent feature-set decisions by the Firefox team, I can't help wondering whether they are falling into the 80/20 fallacy.
Monday, August 16, 2004
Some like it hot
Update: some more details of the preparation added.
We aren't an all-the-year-round Hamin eating family, but the period during the summer when we don't eat Hamin (otherwise known as cholent) gets shorter every year, and this year it seems to be over already.
Like everybody else, I, and I alone, know the One True Way to prepare Hamin, and it's like this:
- 500g shoulder meat cut into chunks.
- About a cup full of wheat grains.
- 4-8 potatoes, depending on size, peeled and cut into largish pieces.
- 2-3 sweet potatoes, ditto.
- 1 or 2 swedes, ditto (I think that's the English for לפת).Update: it seems it's a turnip, see comments
- 1 head of garlic, whole but with the outer skin removed.
- 1 hot green pepper, either whole or sliced.
- 1 egg per person (raw, in the shell), and a few more in case of unexpected guests.
- 1 kishke.
Fry the meat briefly to seal it (there is probably a technical term for this which I don't know). It should have enough fat that you don't need any added oil. Take off the heat and add some combination of salt, pepper, cummin, cinnamon, hot chilli powder, cloves, cardamons, ginger, coriander, paprika, turmeric or whatever else you feel like. Mix well. Add everything else. Cover with water. Bring to the boil and put on a hotplate until tomorrow. Serve with arak or single malt Scotch.
Wednesday, August 04, 2004
Overheard in the street
Teen girl to teen boy: "I can't stay later than 12: my parents told me to be home by 10."
Are you bluish? You don't look bluish!
Aviad will be bar mitzvah next February and we have been working together on learning his Torah portion, Parshat Teruma (Exodus 25,1 – 27,19). One of the first questions to come up was, what exactly is the "blue" (תכלת) mentioned in chapter 25 verse 4, which is also used for making Tzitzit — except that it isn't, and hasn't been for over 1,000 years, because nobody knows the correct dye to use.
Or
so
I
thought.
With a little googling we discovered the website of P'til Tekhelet, and today we went on a tour of the factory. I understand from the articles on the website that the identification of the murex with tekhelet is still controversial, but I'm convinced. From now on, I will be wearing my blue thread with pride and joy. I'm not a huge Zionist, but it is a huge privilege to be living in a Jewish country at a time and place where something like this that was thought lost for ever has been rediscovered.
Tuesday, August 03, 2004
Updates
I've added some more of my favourite blogs to the sidebar. Since I've been commenting on other people's blogs recently, it seems only fair to enable comments here as well. Please feel free to say hello!
Wednesday, July 14, 2004
God-zilla
The latest hot topic in Mozilla blog-land is God.
It started when Gerv went into hospital with appendicitis, and asked "Those Christians among you, please pray that he would trust continually in Christ as his strength and as his Creator!".
I and others of Gerv's friends and colleagues added our prayers to the comments on his blog, in spite of not being Christians, and, ברוך רופא חולים, Gerv was soon back minus his appendix, saying:
…thank you to all of you who commented wishing me the best. I must first stress that the sentiment is very much appreciated in all cases…However, I'm afraid I'd have to respectfully disagree with a couple of the theological statements. It may offend people to say it, but it's true - anyone praying who wasn't praying to the one true God of the Bible was wasting their time.
Now this really put the cat among the pigeons. Commenters had a field day, and jesus_x and aebrahim wrote blog entries of their own, which also inspired lively rounds of comments.
It's hard for me to tell whether Gerv's views are representative of Christianity in general. The suggestion that Muslims and Jews are "worshipping and relating to a false image of God - an idol" is not what I have heard from the Christians I have met and talked to at ecumenical conferences and elsewhere, and not what I read in Lumen Gentium.
In the first place we must recall the people to whom the testament and the promises were given and from whom Christ was born according to the flesh. On account of their fathers this people remains most dear to God, for God does not repent of the gifts He makes nor of the calls He issues.
But the plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator. In the first place amongst these there are the Mohamedans, who, professing to hold the faith of Abraham, along with us adore the one and merciful God, who on the last day will judge mankind.
Then there is the passage from C. S. Lewis' "The Last Battle" which I alluded to in one of my own comments:
"If any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath's sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it now, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash the deed is accepted.
That passage, like many others in the Narnia books which I read and reread in my formative years, was a big influence on my own religious thinking.
Thursday, June 10, 2004
Some Poetry
I recently discovered a very cool site, Seforim Online. Downloads are a little slow, but they have lots of excellent stuff. I've been reading and enjoying some of Abraham Ibn Ezra's poems. Look at this little gem:
אִלּוּ לְפִי אֵידִי דְּמָעַי יִזְלוּן
לֹא דָרְכָה רֶגֶל אֱנוֹשׁ יַבֶּשֶׁת,
אַךְ לֹא לְמֵי נֹח לְבַד כֹּרַת בְּרִית,
כִּי גַם לְדִמְעִי נִרְאֲתָה הַקֶּשֶׁת.
Or this question and answer, each one a perfect palindrome that reads more naturally than any palindrome I have seen in any language
אבי אל חי שמך למה מלך משיח לא יבא?
דעו מאביכם כי לא בוש אבוש, שוב אשוב אליכם כי בא מועד.
Sunday, June 06, 2004
Qamats and Segol are now endangered species.
I am still in shock from this article, maybe because I have never accepted the concept of the "Academy of the Hebrew language" as dictators of what is or isn't correct Hebrew. And my confidence is hardly increased when that last link doesn't work for me and I have to root out the original article from Google cache.
However, my chief astonishment comes from the confident statement that Tsere and Segol are pronounced the same. It just goes to show that native speakers of a language are simply unaware of many of the distinctions that they themselves make when speaking it. Now I come to think of it, I was never aware that the two "l"s in "little" are prononounced differently in English, until someone pointed it out to me.
Monday, February 16, 2004
Dateline Las Cruces, NM
On the sixth day of our road trip, we at last have the luxury of an RV park with wireless internet access, and I managed to catch up with some percentage of the hundreds of emails that have been accumulating.
So far we have camped in Hollister Hills, Ciasta Lake, Joshua Tree National Park, Phoenix, AZ (where the site we booked by phone, and who interrogated us in detail about the size and age of our RV, but forgot to ask until we got there whether we had children in the party, and when they discovered that we did, forced us to look elsewhere, so we ended up missing the Friday night service we wanted to attend at Ruach Hamidbar), Willcox, AZ, and tonight at Las Cruces, NM.
Plans for next week: El Paso, Carlsbad Caverns, Santa Fe, the Four Corners area, and some of the National Parks in Utah.
Sunday, January 25, 2004
More From My Commonplace Book
It's a sad coincidence that I should have come to this entry in my commonplace book on the same day that I read Joan Aiken's obituary.
You can have a grievance or you can have fun, but you can't have both.
Joan Aiken, Foul Matter
Thursday, January 22, 2004
From My Commonplace Book
Every now and then I think to myself how much I would like to have an old-fashioned commonplace book in which I could copy down passages from books that make a particular impression on me. Occasionally I even start copying a few on scraps of paper, or into files on the computer.
Just now while tidying up some old papers I found one of these abortive attempts, which as far as I remember dates from around 1987. Here is the first entry:
He could finish this horse if he wanted to, and nobody but he would ever know that he had not kept his bargain to the full. Nobody but he would ever know that he had betrayed the dream, the vision that comes to all the makers of the world before they make a new thing, whether it be a song or a sword or a chalk-cut horse half a hill-side high.
Rosemary Sutcliff, Sun Horse, Moon Horse.
Thursday, January 15, 2004
Counting my blessings
I could never adequately express my gratitude for true friendship. I can hardly believe how lucky I am. What a gift it is to have somebody in my life who cares so much about me, who is interested in so many of the same things that I am and loves doing them with me or talking about them with me, who knows much more than I about some things and is ready to teach, who knows less than I about some things and is eager to learn.
In some ways that last is the greatest gift of all. By asking questions about things that I learned long ago and have taken for granted for many years, my friend makes me think about them again and discover things that I was unaware I knew. No exaggeration: this friendship has changed my life.
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