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random (Jewish) bits
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jducoeur. (I have a CD library with search in
English and Hebrew, but it never hurts to have more, especially if
they do upgrade the extension to do morphological search, which the
tool I have doesn't do. Besides, while it doesn't happen often,
it's nice to be able to look something up from other than my home
machine.)
A former congregant was just ordained as a Reconstructionist rabbi. She came back to visit this past Shabbat, but disappeared after the morning service within about five minutes (before I got a chance to talk with her). Sigh. So I don't know how long she's back in town, where she's staying, or what her future plans are. I last saw her in December and would love to know how she's doing now that she's finished the program.
My rabbi, the cantorial soloist, and I need to have a meeting to go over plans for the bar mitzvah in a few weeks. We've been trying to have this meeting for a few weeks, but things keep happening. Looks like later this week for sure. The soloist said in passing (Friday night) something like "it's ok; I can do that service cold", which misses the point -- even if she can and I can, that doesn't mean we can. I learned that rather thoroughly during the Sh'liach K'hilah program. If I were doing the service by myself everything would be fine; there are other people involved, however, so we need to make sure everyone knows who does what.
I got a bit of an insight Shabbat morning, when someone was talking about her child's (recent) bar mitzvah and how the rabbi had been really good to work with -- he knew how to give her son quiet reassurances during the service when he was getting nervous, but also knew when to just let him fix the problems he was having. I won't just be leading a service; I'll be facilitating a significant life-cycle event for someone, and for the kid it's probably the most nervousness-inducing thing he's ever done. There's a lot to being a rabbi that has nothing to do with liturgical fluency and scholarship. (Apropos of nothing, it sometimes seems that there's a fair bit of social work/counselling in the job, too.)
Noticed Shabbat morning during torah study: when Moshe is lecturing the people about the importance of keeping God's commandments, in Deut 5:3 he says "God did not make this covenant with our fathers but with us". I really expected to see an "only" there. God did make a covenent with their fathers (the ones who actually left Egypt; Moshe is now speaking to their children). But there is no "only" ("rak") there. Now if you believe that Deuteronomy was written later, or by men, you can just say that, well, Moshe is playing a little fast and loose with the facts for the sake of rhetoric. (It wouldn't be the only thing he says that doesn't track 100% with the earlier accounts.) If it's all divine writ, though, the problem is a little harder. I find myself wondering if the distinction is in fact important -- maybe that God attempted to make a covenant with their fathers, but a covenant requires two partners and they weren't up to the task, so maybe (in the end) it's saying that the first real covenant was with their children. I don't think that's a view that would have much support in tradition, because the image of standing at Sinai to recieve torah is so powerful and so infused in Jewish tradition, but it's what came to mind.
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Excellent point about multiple b'ritot. I wonder if this implies that there will be yet another b'rit when the moshiach comes. We, today, are more heirs to the b'rit at Har Sinai than the b'rit before entering the land, after all; while we can enter the land, it's not the homecoming that the desert generation had.
The theophany at Sinai was followed by the sin of the molten calf and led to forty years of wandering untli that generation died out.
It took me a while to get used to the idea that the forty years and dying out was not punishment for the molten calf but, instead, punishment for not entering the land when it was offered. The calf seems like a bigger sin because it's easy to see it as a willful act while we think of being afraid of the giants in the land as being a gut-level reaction. But the reverse makes more sense: making the idol was very natural to them at that time; when they thought their leader had disappeared they fell back on what they knew in Mitzrayim. But later, after seeing more of God's miracles and hearing mixed (not uniformly-negative) reports of the land, they chose not to believe that God would lead them to victory. The calf was a search for familiar ritual; the refuasl to enter was a direct refusal to believe and follow. So nu, they didn't get it, which is what they said they wanted.
But that doesn't necessarily mean the previous covenant didn't take; this is a new, deeper covenant. (I know, that's dangerously close to supercessionism.)
Not necessarily deeper or supercessionist -- just different, or maybe supplementary. We're all bound by Sinai because that was for all generations, after all.
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It's too late to start researching tonight, but this is something new to think about. Thanks!
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BTW, there's a free, if somewhat oddly formatted, Rashi commentary available for PalmOS; I use it with a Palm bible reader and a free JPS chumash. Or you can use the online Rashi at chabad.org, which is where the PalmOS one originated; I think the odd formatting is because it was web-scraped.
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