random (Jewish) bits
Online, searchable bible, talmud, and others...
as a Firefox extension
(Hebrew only). Nifty! (And the keyboard for typing Hebrew can be used
other ways, too, which solves another problem I sometimes have.) Thank
you jducoeur. (I have a CD library with search in
English and Hebrew, but it never hurts to have more, especially if
they do upgrade the extension to do morphological search, which the
tool I have doesn't do. Besides, while it doesn't happen often,
it's nice to be able to look something up from other than my home
machine.)
A former congregant was just ordained as a Reconstructionist rabbi. She came back to visit this past Shabbat, but disappeared after the morning service within about five minutes (before I got a chance to talk with her). Sigh. So I don't know how long she's back in town, where she's staying, or what her future plans are. I last saw her in December and would love to know how she's doing now that she's finished the program.
My rabbi, the cantorial soloist, and I need to have a meeting to go over plans for the bar mitzvah in a few weeks. We've been trying to have this meeting for a few weeks, but things keep happening. Looks like later this week for sure. The soloist said in passing (Friday night) something like "it's ok; I can do that service cold", which misses the point -- even if she can and I can, that doesn't mean we can. I learned that rather thoroughly during the Sh'liach K'hilah program. If I were doing the service by myself everything would be fine; there are other people involved, however, so we need to make sure everyone knows who does what.
I got a bit of an insight Shabbat morning, when someone was talking about her child's (recent) bar mitzvah and how the rabbi had been really good to work with -- he knew how to give her son quiet reassurances during the service when he was getting nervous, but also knew when to just let him fix the problems he was having. I won't just be leading a service; I'll be facilitating a significant life-cycle event for someone, and for the kid it's probably the most nervousness-inducing thing he's ever done. There's a lot to being a rabbi that has nothing to do with liturgical fluency and scholarship. (Apropos of nothing, it sometimes seems that there's a fair bit of social work/counselling in the job, too.)
Noticed Shabbat morning during torah study: when Moshe is lecturing the people about the importance of keeping God's commandments, in Deut 5:3 he says "God did not make this covenant with our fathers but with us". I really expected to see an "only" there. God did make a covenent with their fathers (the ones who actually left Egypt; Moshe is now speaking to their children). But there is no "only" ("rak") there. Now if you believe that Deuteronomy was written later, or by men, you can just say that, well, Moshe is playing a little fast and loose with the facts for the sake of rhetoric. (It wouldn't be the only thing he says that doesn't track 100% with the earlier accounts.) If it's all divine writ, though, the problem is a little harder. I find myself wondering if the distinction is in fact important -- maybe that God attempted to make a covenant with their fathers, but a covenant requires two partners and they weren't up to the task, so maybe (in the end) it's saying that the first real covenant was with their children. I don't think that's a view that would have much support in tradition, because the image of standing at Sinai to recieve torah is so powerful and so infused in Jewish tradition, but it's what came to mind.
A former congregant was just ordained as a Reconstructionist rabbi. She came back to visit this past Shabbat, but disappeared after the morning service within about five minutes (before I got a chance to talk with her). Sigh. So I don't know how long she's back in town, where she's staying, or what her future plans are. I last saw her in December and would love to know how she's doing now that she's finished the program.
My rabbi, the cantorial soloist, and I need to have a meeting to go over plans for the bar mitzvah in a few weeks. We've been trying to have this meeting for a few weeks, but things keep happening. Looks like later this week for sure. The soloist said in passing (Friday night) something like "it's ok; I can do that service cold", which misses the point -- even if she can and I can, that doesn't mean we can. I learned that rather thoroughly during the Sh'liach K'hilah program. If I were doing the service by myself everything would be fine; there are other people involved, however, so we need to make sure everyone knows who does what.
I got a bit of an insight Shabbat morning, when someone was talking about her child's (recent) bar mitzvah and how the rabbi had been really good to work with -- he knew how to give her son quiet reassurances during the service when he was getting nervous, but also knew when to just let him fix the problems he was having. I won't just be leading a service; I'll be facilitating a significant life-cycle event for someone, and for the kid it's probably the most nervousness-inducing thing he's ever done. There's a lot to being a rabbi that has nothing to do with liturgical fluency and scholarship. (Apropos of nothing, it sometimes seems that there's a fair bit of social work/counselling in the job, too.)
Noticed Shabbat morning during torah study: when Moshe is lecturing the people about the importance of keeping God's commandments, in Deut 5:3 he says "God did not make this covenant with our fathers but with us". I really expected to see an "only" there. God did make a covenent with their fathers (the ones who actually left Egypt; Moshe is now speaking to their children). But there is no "only" ("rak") there. Now if you believe that Deuteronomy was written later, or by men, you can just say that, well, Moshe is playing a little fast and loose with the facts for the sake of rhetoric. (It wouldn't be the only thing he says that doesn't track 100% with the earlier accounts.) If it's all divine writ, though, the problem is a little harder. I find myself wondering if the distinction is in fact important -- maybe that God attempted to make a covenant with their fathers, but a covenant requires two partners and they weren't up to the task, so maybe (in the end) it's saying that the first real covenant was with their children. I don't think that's a view that would have much support in tradition, because the image of standing at Sinai to recieve torah is so powerful and so infused in Jewish tradition, but it's what came to mind.