random bits

This book could have been written just for me. It explains basic grammatical concepts, first explaining how they work in English (a refresher for some, news for others) and then explains how the same concept works in biblical Hebrew -- well, from what I've seen so far. Score! Of course, some Hebrew concepts don't exist in English (or are very limited), but they seem to do a good job of explaining those too. (Haven't finished reading it yet.)

Comprehension definitely helps with learning torah portions. ( Read more... )

Does anyone reading this know how to export a Windows color scheme? Having developed one on one machine, is there a faster path than recreating it to get it onto a second machine? (Source is Win2k, target is XP.) Oh, and a raspberry to Microsoft, which both offers color schemes in its window manager and then selectively ignores them in one of its major applications (Outlook). (No, I don't use Outlook by choice.)

My niece came back from a semester in Italy asking questions about my (Italian) grandfather's citizenship status. Apparently if he got his US citizenship late enough, my niece thinks she can claim Italian citizenship. Sounds odd to me; I thought these things tended to go back, at most, to grandparents, and this would be her great-grandfather. But a quick look at Wikipedia confirms. Ok, the question is whether he became a US citizen before my father was born. Well, I presume that my niece is smart enough to figure out (with internet aid) how to get the relevant records, since no one in the immediate family seems to know.

Y'know, I never would have made a trip to a library for something I was merely curious about, and probably wouldn't have rememebered the curiosity the next time I was in a library anyway. (Dozens or hundreds more would have come and gone.) But less than a minute immediately spent with Google and Wikipedia got me a reasonably authoritative answer to, in this case, a question of Italian citizenship laws. I find this ability to satisfy my curiosity really handy. Currently I have to be sitting at my desk to do it, and many idle curiosities fall by the wayside because we were at the dinner table or out with friends or walking down the street or whatever. But someday that won't be a limitation; it already isn't for many people. Now, if we can just keep governments and ISPs from messing up the free and open network that makes all this possible. (Mind, this trick doesn't always work, or I wouldn't have asked the question about Windows color schemes. But it works often enough.)

Thanks to xiphias for pointing out this post about planned changes to the LJ profile page. Blech. How very...juvenile.

A while ago cahwyguy posted a cute link to the 3rd annual Nigerian email conference.

LJ customization question

I've never delved into S2 customization, but I know some of you have so I'm hoping one of you can throw me a few hints.

I'm using Generator, which I mostly like (it has the useful property of protecting my reading page from wide entries), but on pages for individual entries (mine or others'), it shows the default userpic instead of the one for that particular entry. How do I fix that? Until recently I was just using the LJ default style for viewing individual entries (which gets this right), rather than trying to impose my style, but the white background is kind of harsh and I see no way to just change the colors on the LJ default. So instead I have to impose an entire style. Fooey.

murder, manslaughter, and cities of refuge

The Hebrew root reish-tzadi-chet means "murder", as in the ten commandments, where it says "lo tirtzach". (Murder, not kill. Just about everyone trying to post ten-commandment plaques in schools and courtrooms is using a translation that is not consistent with the original Hebrew. Which, granted, might not be a priority for people who take their text from the Greek.)

Murder is a capital offense, but accidental killing is not, and the torah sets aside cities of refuge where the manslaughterer can go for safety. (He's fleeing vengeful relatives, not the law.) Every translation I've seen describes the cities as for the manslaughterer or accidental killer.

The torah-study group just got to the passage in Deuteronomy that repeats this description. And it says the person who can go there is a "rotzeach", a murderer. I went back to the passage in Numbers where the command is given and it, too, says "rotzeach". Why? Hebrew has a perfectly good word for "kill" -- the root hei-reish-gimel, "harog" (in verb form). Why does the torah say rotzeach, rather than horeig, and why does everyone translate it "manslaughterer" (or equivalent) rather than "murderer"?

While murder is a capital offense, getting a conviction is pretty difficult under halacha. You need two eye-witnesses, who must have warned the person that he is about to commit a capital offense and who must then hear him say he knows that and intends to do it anyway. The court is stacked in favor of the defendant. I think it was Rabbi Akiva who said that a court that executed one person in 70 years was a bloodthirsty court.

So I wonder if the cities of refuge are, at least in part, for the probable murderers -- the people who did in fact murder, but who weren't executed because of these rules of evidence. I'm not sure, but I think that Judaism would hold with "innocent until proven guilty" in this case, at least in matters of public discourse, so it would be considered wrong to call those people murderers when they weren't convicted. The torah, however, is allowed to tell it like it is.

Shabbat morning someone raised the question of whether Moshe was a rotzeach (provable or not -- this is pre-Sinai). He killed the Egyptian who was beating the Hebrew slave. The torah tells us that before doing so he looked "koh v'koh" -- "here and there", loosely. One person thought he was looking out for witnesses; I think he could have been looking around for help -- was anyone going to intervene, or was he going to have to do it himself? It could be either, and the torah doesn't tell us which it is. I wonder what the midrash has to say.