garage-door opener (and some short takes)

[cellio]

Our garage-door opener has been flaky for years and finally gave up the ghost this week. This morning I called Sears in search of a replacement. So I got out the phone book to look up their number.

They listed direct-dial numbers for a bazillion departments, none of which obviously said "garage-door openers go here" to me, and a general number. I called the latter. There was no "talk to a human" option, but there was an exciting automated system that was ready to serve me. Or something.

Digital voice: What department would you like?
Me: Garage-door opener. (To self: if I knew that I wouldn't be calling you!)
DV: Do you mean "hardware and paint"?
Me: No.
DV: What department would you like?
Me: Garage doors.
DV: Do you mean "hardware and paint"?
Me: No.
DV: What department would you like?
Me: Appliances, garage.
DV: Do you mean "hardware and paint"?
Me: Ok, you win.
DV: Please repeat your answer.
Me: Yes.

After all that, the "hardware and paint" department did not answer the phone. So it was time to do some guessing.

I tried "appliances" (noting that "washers/dryers" and "electronics" had separate entries). The person who answered had no clue how to help me, and couldn't connect me with anyone else.

Next I tried "housewares/small appliances", which I thought meant blenders and the like. The person who answered said I had the wrong department but she'd transfer me. I said "Wait! Satisfy my curiosity and tell me where you're sending me!", but it was too late.

The person who answered the transfer was able to tell me about garage-door openers, but I was thrown off and forgot to ask what department I'd reached. My next guess was going to be "lawn and garden" otherwise.

I should note that the only reason I persisted is that we wanted a one-stop solution: buy opener and arrange for installation without having to do a lot of running around. If we had a reliable small-jobs contractor or were electrically handy, I would have gone to Home Depot or Lowes instead.

By the way, when we went to the store this afternoon (no, we couldn't just arrange for an installation person to just bring one), we found the garage-door openers behind the exercise equipment and across the aisle from basketball equipment.

Short takes:

Real Live Preacher recommended the "Velveteen Rabbi" weblog, so I took a look. I found this post about the liberal/conservative divide in Judaism to be interesting. The weblog is syndicated on LJ as velveteenrabbi.

While I'm not comfortable with Bush's nominee for attorney general, my opinion of the guy just went up a notch. Some folks are mad at him because he didn't elevate his own opinions over the law. Gonzale s said in a 2001 interview: "The question is, what is the law, what is the precedent, what is binding in rendering your decision. Sometimes, interpreting a statute, you may have to uphold a statute that you may find personally offensive. But as a judge, that's your job." Wow, someone in a position of authority who gets it! Now, if I could just be more confident that his ears hear what his mouth is saying...

Comments

[tashabear.livejournal.com]

Doesn't HD or Lowes offer you the opportunity to get a contractor to come and install it for you? I know the HD near us will have someone come install a water heater (though we did buy ours from Sears).

[cellio]

Home Depot gives referrals, but we haven't had the greatest luck in getting people for small jobs through them. If you want to replace all your kitchen cabinets the contractors will answer your calls within the hour; if you just want a light fixture or a garage-door opener they don't seem to return calls a lot of the time. This is not Home Depot's fault, really (except if they ignore negative feedback and keep contractors on their list anyway), but it does add one more unpredictable step. We just wanted a vendor who could deliver on installation, even if it's a little more expensive.

[tashabear.livejournal.com]

Completely understandable.

[dagonell.livejournal.com]

Wow. You weren't kidding, were you.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/dagonell/55015.html?thread=68583#t68583

[nsingman.livejournal.com]

That was an interesting essay, and generally how liberals (in the classical sense) and conservatives (also in the classical sense) differ in other ways. I'm not at all observant, but I've always been wary of "One True Path" people, whether it's religious fundamentalists and literalists, or the Randians among my fellow libertarians, or even those who complain about the way I have sashimi with my wasabe. Perhaps if we got more people to understand that breaking with a tradition isn't intrinsically disrespectful it might help.

I love the sense of humor behind an appellation like "The Velveteen Rabbi." Especially as a long-time Sluggy Freelance fan. :-)

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

Meh. I didn't add a comment to that page because there are already a lot of comments there, but I think the answer is not really as mysterious as the author thinks it is. About the liturgy: if you know the traditional liturgy, going to a Reform service or reading a Reform prayerbook is an exercise in finding the bits and pieces that have been retained from that liturgy. ("Wow, they do Aleinu? I didn't know that!" etc.)

What is added to that core is theologically "soft" -- inoffensive, unobjectionable, something we're all pretty familiar with. (I write this as a Conservative, as you know, and I would say the same for Siddur Sim Shalom.) You open up ArtScroll, on the other hand -- especially the bits in the back, untranslated, in a machzor or something -- you find a whole weird world of zodiac signs and golden apple orchards and fiery coals raining down on the wicked.

That "hardness" is what keeps people fascinated in traditional religion in a mostly secular, rational age. It's why Passion of the Christ was so popular. Even if you find it irrational, it's interesting in an aesthetic way -- and worship and ritual are nothing if not aesthetic statements.

I think the broader point about study is more sustainable, but only just. Once upon a time, of course, everyone used Hertz, but each movement needed a chumash that reflected its worldview, the orthodox as much as anyone. (Interestingly, Hertz would be considered too liberal for orthodoxy and too traditional for Conservatism today.) There's no reason that feminist insights into Torah should be rejected by the orthodox out of hand, but I suspect that to them that kind of reading is beside the point.

For the most part, the insights you get into Torah if you read Etz Hayim or Plaut are only valuable if you subscribe to the (historicist) assumptions of the editors. All you have to do (as I did for a dvar torah this past weekend) is pick up the ArtScroll Bereishis to see you are in a totally different world. Many of the things the other chumashes like to play with are settled; what ArtScroll really does is hyperdetailed textual reading. So, what I'm saying is, if you're in that mindset, what the other chumashes have to say is "obvious" compared to what you get in a traditional framework.

We live in a secular society and I think the assumption of everyone, but especially the orthodox, is that the values of that larger society are so readily at hand, we don't need to incorporate them in liturgy or study to understand them. I suspect that if you have an orthodox perspective you've decided to find out as much as you can about those things and that the more equivocal stuff is less interesting. It irks me because I am not myself a subscriber to a fundamentalist, essentialist view of Judaism. But in a non-Jewish world and culture, the "weirdest," most arcane things somehow seem the most authentically Jewish. That's the uphill battle all non-orthodox varieties of Judaism will always face.

[goljerp]

Interestingly, Hertz would be considered too liberal for orthodoxy and too traditional for Conservatism today.

I don't think Hertz is being phased out of Conservative synagogues because he's too "traditional". I think it's because his commentary was (like all commentary is) a product of his time, and his was 1929-36 Britian. Hertz was a bright man, but his commentary isn't timeless. The sexism grates, he drops references to notables of the time who are no longer known by laymen, and of course he wrote before the Shoah and so he makes some comments which are extremely insensitive to our post-Shoah ears. Also, Hertz is engaging in a polemic against the documentary hypothesis, which has essentially been lost. Let me explain that last sentence. It's possible to believe the Torah was given at Sinai by G-d. If that's one's belief, great. No need to look further. However, if one looks at the Torah without the "Torah at Sinai" belief, it is very obvious that we have a document with multiple authors, written at different times, and from different traditions. (If you believe in "Torah at Sinai", perhaps it will help if you just realize that G-d could easily have given Moshe a document that looks like it was written by multiple authors, at different times, to test people's faith. So you should feel good that so many people are failing the test, but you're passing it.) Hertz is trying to win an argument with logic which can really only be won by belief.

[goljerp]

The Velveteen Rabbi blog was interesting. The thing which I think often gets overlooked when talking about the "Orthodox movement" is that the Orthodox have been changing also. People tend to think that there was a "Tradition", and then Reform went to the left, Conservative a bit less to the left, and Orthodox stayed true to the original Tradition... but I don't think that's the case. First of all, the "Tradition" was always changing; it wasn't static. The O. movement is, in some ways, strayed from "Tradition" also, in that the majority of changes in Tradition that they've embraced (especially recently) have been stringencies, whereas in the past, the Tradition changed to introduce both stringencies and leniencies to common practice. Part of this is probably a reaction to the Reform and especially the Conservative movements -- after all, if the Cs say that Swordfish is Kosher, how can O agree? This is, of course, glossing over the Modern Orthodox movement... but it seems to me that the O movement in general has also departed from "Tradition" -- only in their case, to the "right", rather than the "left".

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

Hertz is engaging in a polemic against the documentary hypothesis, which has essentially been lost.

That's what I meant -- he's too "traditional" in the sense that he argues against a hypothesis that is required for study at JTS today. He's being phased out because historicism has long been an essential component of a Conservative approach to halacha.

I wouldn't say that Hertz is timeless, only that he provided an interesting, temporary common ground among different streams of American Judaism.

As for the argument, the documentary hypothesis had (and has) its own problems. Hertz, like a lot of Jews who came of age in the late nineteenth century (I.M. Wise, for example) were sensitive to the very anti-Semitic overtones of contemporary biblical critics. So he engaged in a work of apologetics, which has a long and honorable tradition in Judaism. It's just dated.

From his perspective (like that many orthodox people today) it's not a matter of logic over faith, it's that the burden of proof is on the critics, not the tradition. So all you have to do is show that the critics are wrong or biased on this or that detail -- which was certainly true of biblical critics at the time Hertz was writing.