weekend stuff
Dec. 12th, 2004 10:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cellioTorah 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.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-14 03:35 pm (UTC)Oh, sure -- I wouldn't blame a publisher for trying for the maximal market. It didn't occur to me that the larger market might be the non-Jewish world. And, as you point out, it would be bad form for URJ to disenfranchise its members. :-)
I don't know what our congregation will do. We didn't jump to Eitz Chayim. We could move to Plaut 2.0 in phases -- I'd suggest starting with enough copies for the Shabbat-morning study group and going from there -- but I don't know if we will. We might decide to save those dollars for upgrading siddurim instead, as more person-time is spent there than in the chumash. And I expect there'll be a new machzor along several years after Mishkan T'filah, and we definitely have a machzor problem now. So hmm. I'll have input, but it's not my decision.
Thanks for the pointer to the sample pages! I didn't realize those were up. Yes, that looks like it will be much better than 1.0. I wonder what the page count will be. (They don't seem to say.)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-14 05:48 pm (UTC)I think I was thinking of the Fox. I like that translation, but it isn't really usable in shul as a chumash because there's no Hebrew in the current edition. The pagination is also "English". When Dr. Fox came to talk at my shul a few years ago, someone asked about that: I seem to recall that there were a couple of problems. One was that the publisher didn't feel that there would be enough demand for a version with the Hebrew for it to be worthwhile. Another has to do with the format of his translation: it is in lines, like poetry. If you cut the page in half vertically, you'll lose the impact. I guess you could do something like have English on one page, Hebrew + commentaries on the facing page... but that would greatly increase the page count (already around 1000 pages). Anyhow, that's what the publishers decided. So, if it's not selling as a chumash, then who's buying it? Obviously Jews are, but presumably a large number of Christians are, as well.
I wonder what the page count will be. (They don't seem to say.)
Yeah. The FAQ page says, unsurprisingly, that the pagination will be different than 1.0. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the page count will be less than 1.0. The reason? The pages will be thicker, and if they keep the same page count, they'll end up with a huge tome that nobody will be able to use easily. How they'll do that is a good question...
Hmm, not sure if the pagination in the sample is correct, but the Haftorah for Va-yiggash ends on page 303 in the sample, as opposed to pg. 292 in Etz Chayim. So over the first 11 parshiot, Plaut 2.0 is 11 pages longer. If we extrapolate that, we get 1269 pages, not including haftorot for special occasions and holidays, or matter at the back of the book. EC is about 1560 pages all told (lots of essays at the end).
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-14 06:09 pm (UTC)A lot of Christians like to say that "we have the same (subset of) bible" or "we worship the same god". Ain't true, but folks who believe that are probably interested in accessible Jewish translations.
The pages will be thicker, and if they keep the same page count, they'll end up with a huge tome that nobody will be able to use easily. How they'll do that is a good question...
I agree that they really need to drop the page count given the other changes. The only way I think they could do that, though, is to drop some of the commentary and gleanings. Are they willing to do that? (This is kind of a mixed bag; I'm sure I could find 50% of this by page count to cut, but I'm probably more ruthless than they are.)
Oh, and apropos of page count -- an index? A well-made chumash doesn't need an index, because you know the layout. The only thing I can think of is that they're indexing the commentary ("where was that passage about ancient worship of Murdak?"), but I'm not sure it's a good idea if page count is a factor.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-16 01:00 pm (UTC)The point I wasn't making very well was that the fact that it can't be used as a chumash is due, at least in part, to a conscious decision on the part of the publisher.
I agree that they really need to drop the page count given the other changes. The only way I think they could do that, though, is to drop some of the commentary and gleanings.
I suspect that's what they're going to do. They can probably get rid of some of the gleanings without it being so obvious - there were something like 3 pages of gleanings for the sample parsha; while that's a lot, I'm pretty sure it's less than the number of pages scattered about in 1.0.
Oh, and apropos of page count -- an index? A well-made chumash doesn't need an index, because you know the layout.
Oh, I disagree. I mean, let's say we're talking about the law of shooing a mother bird away from the nest before taking the eggs. You and I both know that it's in the Torah, and you probably could even say which parsha it's in, and then page through it and find the verse. I'd guess it would either be in the parsha o' laws in Exodus (after they're in the desert), or in the chunk o' laws in Deuteronomy. So I'd go off to Exodus, flip around until I found, oh, yeah, it's Mishpatim that has all those laws, then read through. Nope, doesn't seem to be there. On to Deuteronomy. Now, where is it there? R'eih? Hmm... It talks about Kashrut, but that's not it. Shoftim? Yeah, that sounds right. No, it's not there. Ki Tetzei? Yeah, that's it. And, hey, my Chumash opens to the right page: it's Deuteronomy 22:6, page 1116/7. Now, if I had gone right to the Index of the Eitz Chayim, I'd have looked up "Birds" and gone to the one entry, which gives the list of Kosher birds in Leviticus. Whoops. Back to the index, looking up "nest". No entry. Um, "mother"? Yes, that's it: "mother and young of birds, 1116-1117". Much faster for me, let alone someone who isn't familiar enough with Torah to narrow it down as much as I did. And you can have a smaller font and narrower columns in an index than in the rest of the book.
index
Date: 2004-12-16 02:34 pm (UTC)