shiva minyan, and community versus personal needs

[cellio]

Shabbat afternoon I got a phone call from my rabbi. Could I lead a shiva minyan that night at 7? 7 is rather before sundown these days, so I asked if it was in Squirrel Hill. No, he said, Oakland.
I hesitated. He heard the pause. I said I try not to drive on Shabbat

Comments

[cellio]

Paging is normal; now I know to plan for it in that book. (I don't own a copy of this book, so I didn't have a chance to look it over before I got there.)

This was true even though my congrations rabbi had chaired some of the liturgical committees.

That's not surprising -- as soon as a committee contains more than one person, you know you're going to lose on some points. :-)

try that again with correct markup :/

[geekosaur]

m'vinah, actually; the infinitive is l'havin, while the dictionary gives the conventional third person singular masculine form. (As for binyan, it's hif`il of the bet-yud-nun root; m'daberet is pi`el.)

(Of course, I had to go digging to figure that out; I'm not exactly ready to speak it either :> )

Re: try that again with correct markup :/

[cellio]

Ah, thanks! I didn't realize that the dictionary wasn't giving the infinitive, though I suppose I should have been suspicious because don't most infinitives have that lamed prefix?

Re: try that again with correct markup :/

[geekosaur]

All of them, as far as I know (it's just "to ...", like English). But most Hebrew dictionaries use the third person singular masculine, past tense, as the canonical entry because it's the simplest: reasonably standard voweling (as reflected in the binyan names), no prefixes or suffixes. The other forms are easily derived from it (or as easily as one can get; there's lots of special cases, my copy of Maskilon I has 158 verb schemata (each including tense but not binyan) and it only covers the most common verbs).

Re: try that again with correct markup :/

[dglenn]

Interesting ... in Greek (at least ancient Greek; I haven't looked at a modern Greek dictionary) they use first person singular present.

(Which makes Greek verbs in etymologies in English dictionaries look strange to me, since those do use the infinitive so I get a double dose of (fortunately mild) cognitive dissonancce; first because it's "-ein" instead of "-o", and second because it's "-ein" instead of "-ειν" ... what my brain really keeps expecting is "-ω".)

I hadn't really thought about which other languages might give verbs in something other than the infinitive by default. Now I'm wndering about Latin, German, Arabic, ...

[ichur72]

It would be something like:

Ani lo mdaberet ivrit, aval ani mevinah ktzat.

"Ktzat" is "a little bit", and saying "I understand" is "ani mevin/mevinah".

[cellio]

Thank you!

[goljerp]

Ah, yes, ktzat. I'd forgotten that... I used to say "ktzat" with appropriate hand motions showing that I really meant ktzat. Now I guess I'd just have to say I don't speak or understand it... sigh...

[jducoeur]

I wouldn't worry about the hesitation -- it simply indicates thought. While it's reasonable to say that the needs of the community trump those of the individual, that doesn't mean that *any* community demand trumps *all* individual needs. These things need to be balanced, and that balance requires thought -- especially in the Reform environment as you've described it. A hesitation to establish where that balance falls for you seems entirely appropriate to me...