parsha bit: Chayei Sarah

When the torah tells us about Yitzchak's marriage to Rivka, it says he married her and he loved her. The rabbis pick up on that ordering. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch teaches that this is because the wedding should not be the summit of the relationship but, rather, the seed of future love.

My usual tertiary sources failed me this week; I was looking for midrash on the portion, not commentary. Is there a collection of midrash bits, sorted by theme or (ideally) parsha, akin to Baron's quotations? It seems like a handy tool for enhancing sermons.

LJ: tags

Tags: so close and yet so far. Sigh.

I really like being able to tag journal entries. This should, in principle, make it much easier to find specific entries in the future -- the "gee, I know I posted about $SUBJECT sometime last year" factor. Yes, I know tags can be used two ways, for retrieval and for entry synopsis; I care deeply about the former and not at all about the latter. If my subject lines, opening paragraphs, and cut-tag text fail to give you an idea reasonably quickly about what the entry is about, I have likely failed as a writer.

Ok, so retrieval is critical. LJ documentation says that you can only retrieve the 100 most recent entries with a given tag, which sounds like a lot but isn't if you've had your journal a while. Worse, it was only some time later, after I'd tagged a bunch of entries, that I discovered that the limit is really 70 (or 75?), not 100. At least in my journal's style. I think this is probably a bug in the style and I did report it a while back; as I recall, it disappeared into the land of "we'll investigate". But that was at least thee months ago, so maybe they really consider it a featue.

This limitation might be fine if you could query tags using boolean expressions. It would let me have fairly general buckets while still being able to find, say, my entries about SCA cooking ("sca" and "food"). Boolean expressions have been requested, but I don't think they're working on it.

So, erratically, I've been refactoring some of my tags that turned out to be too general. While a few of these were in the "what was I thinking?" category, like my "judaism" tag, some are ones I fully expected to stay under 100 when I created them. And they did -- but they went over 75. Or they're in danger of doing so.

There will come a point in the future when the limits on entries will make tags useless. I've had this journal for over four years and wouldn't be surprised if I still have it four years from now, after all. Eventually they're going to have to either boost the limit or implement boolean expressions. (And maybe hierarchical tags.)

So please excuse the taggy clutter in my journal; this is a gradual process. (And I've got a lot of untagged entries, too.) If you notice suboptimal tags on my entries, particularly older ones, feel free to drop me email or a comment about it.

this morning's service

I pried myself out of bed this morning to go to minyan; while normally I would have slept in on a day off from work, as the leader I didn't have that option. There were two other people when I got there (five minutes early). By the start time we were up to six, but unfortunately we topped out at nine. I often have to skip the first kaddish or two; a few times I've had to skip barchu; once I had to skip kedusha. I've never had to skip the torah service and mourners' kaddish before. That was weird, and unsatisfying. (The torah reader wasn't thrilled either.)

(I mean this is the first time in this congregation. I had to skip a torah service once at my home congregation.)

(For those who don't know, the parts of the service I listed are ones that require a minyan, ten adults, to do.)

The group has apparently talked about starting services later on secular holidays, but there were objections -- from people who were not there this morning. I predict that they will revisit the question. :-)

family visit

We had the usual Thanksgiving gathering at my parents' house today. Everyone seems to be doing well overall. The nephew was sometimes snarky but usually well-behaved. The niece was sometimes quite rude to her mother and my parents; while some of her frustration was provoked, some of it was either gratuitious or, more likely, connected to something else that I never saw (past differences or the like). But this was pretty much limited to part of dinner; the rest of the time they were not interested in interacting with us. Oh well; I guess this is the surly stage or something. Things have been worse.

The niece is going to study in Italy next semester. I'd hoped to hear more about that from her, but she wasn't being talkative. Oh well. (She's a junior in college.) My mother was expressing the usual grandparental concern about her being "all alone" on a big trip, but I suspect she'll be fine -- and that even if she's not, she's probably not receptive to advice right now.

My parents are talking about going to Italy for a week or so while she's there -- not to bother her, they said, though if they can see her they'd like that. I'm glad that my parents are thinking more about travel; it's something they've enjoyed in the past, and then they couldn't for a while because their elderly dog was sick. The dog has passed on, which is sad, but that does leave them free to travel now.

There was a lot of good food. My mother made the turkey, stuffing, cranberry relish, mashed potatoes, honey-glazed carrots, and sugar-snap peas. Either she or my sister made the yam/oatmeal/sugar/not-sure-what-else casserole. I made a salad (lettuce, some veggies, apple, mango, hard-boiled eggs -- went over well) and bread. All of this is sounding reasonable so far, right?

And then there was dessert. For calibration, there were seven of us. Given that, I think my mother's apple-nut cake (large pan -- 10x13?) would have been sufficient. But my sister wanted to contribute something, so there was a mixed-berry pie. But that might not be enough, so my mother also made a huge poppyseed cake. (Alas, this one was dairy so I didn't have any.) In other words, there was enough food for each person to have the equivalent of half a pie. Fortunately, the poppyseed cake, at least, will freeze.