Aviad, describing himself on an school application form:
“If the religious were red and the secular were yellow, I would be orange.”
Fatherhood is all about learning to handling new experiences, and here’s one I haven’t had before. What should a father do when he sees his daughter spread over a Jewlicious post singing the praises of “hot frum girls“?
My own first answer was “load his shotgun.”
It must be something in the air: the dust had hardly settled from everyone wishing Naomi Chana Mazal Tov on her engagement to D, and now Noa is engaged to B.
I hope they’ll all be very happy.
In response to popular demand (well, one comment from Talmida), I’ve uploaded larger, non-animated images of the front, inside and back of the invitations.
The graphics are all taken from “carpet pages” from 14th century illuminated Biblical manuscripts. The quotation on the inside is from the Babylonian Talmud, Hhullin 89a:
Rabbi Meir said, “Why is Tekhelet different from all other colours? Because Tekhelet is like the sea, and the sea is like the sky, and the sky is like sapphire, and sapphire is like [God’s] Glorious Throne.”
More will be heard of this theme in my דבר תורה at the Bar Mitzvah.
No reason why I shouldn’t blow my own trumpet occasionally.
Here is the invitation we designed for Aviad’s Bar Mitzvah, using motifs from illuminated manuscripts, and I think it came out very well:
Shamelessly stolen from a comment on Hirhurim by someone called Fotheringay-phipps:
They say a story about the head of the local apikorsim who was dying. And as he lay there on his deathbed, with his apikorus talmidim gathered around him, he told them “call the rov – I want to do t’shuva“. So they told him “how could you do this? All these years you’ve been teaching us k’fira, and now you want to do t’shuva?” And he responded “Aderaba! Ich vil vaisen az dos vos shtait in Gemera ‘risho’im afilu al pischan shel gihenim ainam chozrim‘ – dos is oich falsh!“
Today is my mother’s second Yahrtzeit, the anniversary of her death by the Hebrew calendar.
We invited several friends of ours and hers over for an azkara or memorial service, with prayers (I think this was the first time in my life that I have led a weekday evening service), light refreshments and Torah study. The texts that we learned are available in the original here. I’m feeing totally totally drained right now, but I hope tomorrow or soon I will post a translation and some of what I said for the occasion.
I’m very glad we did it. Everybody who knew her remembers her so fondly, and it was very warming to share reminiscences of her with people.
What do you call this symbol (assuming you have a font that shows it): ✡?
In England it’s usually called a Star of David (which is also the Unicode name for the character), and here in Israel it’s a Magen David (מגן דוד), which literally means Shield of David. In America, people seem to call it a Jewish star (though it has only been a distinctly Jewish symbol for 100 years or so), and in Arabic there’s a generation shift to Khatam Suleiman (خاتم سليمان), Solomon’s Seal.
And now, Google translator has found a new name for it: stomach David.
(Hat-tip to James Davila)
I’m very fond of David Bogner and Treppenwitz, and this post is inspired partly by his weekly “Photo Friday” feature (before I knew that he had a culinary theme this week too), and partly by the comments on this post a few months back about the ingredients of my hamin.
Here is everything which went into the hamin yesterday (not including water and spices. Oh, and only six of those eggs ended up going in). Fourth from the left in the row of vegetables is the lefet which I usually use, which I decided earlier was a turnip, and third from the left is something that I have never seen before which appeared in the supermarket, calling itself a tzenon yarok (צנון ירוק). Is this a rutabaga?
A warm welcome to everyone redirected here from my old blog, and also to any new readers. Feel free to add comments and let me know who is reading and where you come from.
RSS feed is now at http://www.smontagu.org/blog/wp-rss2.php, and I will do my best to make sure it stays there.
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.
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!
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.
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 ׃
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?)
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.
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“.
Well, it should at least increase my geek credibility
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.
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?