weekend stuff

[cellio]

This Shabbat was the first of four in a row where we have no bar or bat mitzvah. This means our rabbi gets to stay for the entire informal morning service -- yay! It's nice that we have lay people who can conduct the service and read torah, but this really is his minyan in many ways, and I feel bad when scheduling makes him miss some of it.

Torah readers are assigned through mid-March. This is the farthest ahead we've been scheduled for a while! I don't know when I'll next read there; I'm probably reading for a women's service in February, but that's a different group. (They asked for volunteers to read torah or lead parts of the service; I said I could do either but have Opinions about content of the latter that I'd like to discuss before committing. So it looks like I get torah reading, which is fine.)

Something I wonder about in this week's portion: after Yosef interprets Paro's dreams, Paro elevates him to second-in-command of all Egypt. One of the things he gives Yosef is the "chariot of the second in command". This makes it sound like the position already exists, which leads me to wonder what happened to the previous holder of that job. Did he misinterpret Paro's dreams?

As long as I'm doing minutiae... during Chanukah and on Purim there's an insertion into the Amidah (central prayer). In the Shabbat service, the siddur includes the Chanukah one but not the Purim one. (The Purim one is included for weekdays, though, so it's not a general oversight.) I wonder if that means that Purim can never fall on Shabbat. (Chanukah, being eight days, is guaranteed to hit at least one Shabbat. I wonder if it can hit two, or if it never starts on Shabbat either.)

Saturday night was my company's holiday party. It was huge! We've been growing a lot, but when people are spread out it's not as obvious. Put us all in one room with significant others and... wow. We missed the party last year, and this was much bigger than two years ago.

The party was fun; the organizers did a good job with it. This year, unlike last year (I'm told), we did not run out of food. Dani found a wine that was sweet enough for him (a Riesling, but I failed to get specifics). Some people brought instruments and were jamming in the front room; I didn't bring any on the theory that it would be Christmas music, but it turns out that would have been ok (they were improvising, mostly). On the other hand, for expedience I would have brought drums, not the hammer dulcimer -- and one of my coworkers is really good on drums, so there wouldn't have been much I could contribute. But I enjoyed listening, so that was fine.

Today the washer and dryer rebelled. (What did we ever do to them?) The washer has decided that it doesn't like the rinse cycle, so it just stops there. We can drain the water and reset it to get it to fill and agitate again, hacking a rinse, but it won't spin. Bah. And then the dryer decided that heat was optional, though once we took the front panel off to look for a fuse (unsuccessfully) and took the vent stack apart looking for a lint clog (nope), it began to give us lackluster heat. I guess we just needed to speak sternly to it -- for now.

The appliances came with the house (five years ago) and weren't new then. I wonder what the usual life-expectancy is on these things. I guess we should find out what a service call costs, and whether he'll give us a break for two appliances in one visit.

So, hours after I expected to be done, my shirts are slowly drying, jeans are queued up behind them, and Dani has a load queued up behind that. Whee.

Comments

[goljerp]

One of the things he gives Yosef is the "chariot of the second in command".

While I'm thinking about translations, it's interesting to note that the translation the Hertz uses (which I think is the "old" JPS?) translates that as P's second-best chariot, which is my excuse for not having thought of that.

As an aside, I wonder if Joy picked up on all my hints about the new Alter translation (The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary ISBN 0393019551) :-)

[cellio]

JPS has "the second chariot which he had"; Eitz Chayim has something approximately what I wrote (I don't have it here as I type). I wonder what the issues in the Hebrew are.

[goljerp]

JPS has "the second chariot which he had"

That's the "old" JPS translation. Eitz Chayim and Plaut use the "new" JPS translation (they started it in 1955, and finished in 1982[1]). The "new" JPS translation is: "He had him ride in the chariot of his second-in-command". Fox translates it, "he had him mount the chariot of his second-in-rank".

My Hebrew is pretty weak; looking at the verse, the relevant hebrew is (if I'm transliterating this correctly) "vayarchev oto b'mircevet hamishneh asher lo", which might help someone else untangle this, or probably not since the actual hebrew letters would be more helpful.

It's interesting that the new translations are just following in the footsteps of Rashi, who explains the verse as "The second to his (Pharaoh's) chariot, that goes next to his." (which seems, to me, to indicate that this is a position, not a second-best chariot.)

[1] Yes, of course I looked that up. And everything else in this comment. Well, except for the existence of the old/new JPS translations, and who uses 'em.

[goljerp]

Eitz Chayim and Plaut use the "new" JPS translation (they started it in 1955, and finished in 1982)

OK, I goofed. I looked at the JPS translation, not the Eitz Chayim. EC uses "...the most recent JPS translation, as corrected in the 2000 edition of its Hebrew-English Tanakh..." (based on the "new" JPS translation). In addition they, "...retranslated a few of the terms related to sacrifices. Thus for 'sin offering' we have substituted 'purification offering'..."

It looks like Plaut 2.0 is going to use the NJPS2K, possibly with added gender-neutral G-d language, for Exodus-Deuteronomy, and another translation for Genesis.