signs

(Longer posts still failing.)

There are signs, for a few miles of highway, for "[My street] detour". Must be some other part of the street; I haven't seen problems. I haven't been curious enough to follow the signs, but I think there are much more direct routes than what they're doing. Hmm: "detour" sounds kind of similar to "deter", as in "you didn't really want to go there, did you?".

Seen on a truck: a sign for Loafer's bread. Cute.

Seen in Regent Square, a shop called "legume". ??? Pretentious food? Pants? Does it amount to a hill of beans?

next few posts

I'm going to post some items on another site and link here. When LJ works I'll copy the posts here. Please comment here, not there, so it'll all end up in the same place.

Miriam and Tzippora

[Written Thursday, 5/31.]

In this week's parsha Miriam and Aharon criticize Moshe over his Cushite wife and Miriam gets tzara'at, "leprosy". (Aharon gets off. I'm not sure why that is.) The torah is short on details. Tonight our associate rabbi used this as the basis of a nice little drash on prejudice and dealing with the stranger in your midst.

Something he said in passing clicked with a midrash I read last night to send my thinking in a completely different direction. According to this midrash -- and you should note that for many midrashim there are equal and opposite midrashim, so take them with a grain of salt -- Miriam had been talking with Moshe's wife, Tzippora, when Eldad and Medad broke out in prophecy. Tzippora, according to the midrash, said something along the lines of "ouch, I pity their poor wives", and went on to explain that since Moshe became a prophet he'd been neglecting his obligations to his wife -- he was busy serving God and Israel instead, one gathers. Miriam said "oh, this is terrible" and went off to chastise Moshe for the way he treated his wife, and got punished. It's a different spin from the common interpretation that the criticism was about the marriage (to a non-Hebrew).

This, in turn, got me thinking about the obligations and effects of leadership. At least in the Reform movement, congregations tend to expect an awful lot of their rabbis. My rabbi works way more than the conventional 40-hour week, and he has to be on call pretty much all the time. He takes work home at night. None of this is unusual (again, in the movement -- I can't generalize). Do we, collectively, expect our rabbis to neglect their family obligations in favor of congregational obligations? Is that really fair? Is it just par for the course, or can we do something about it?

Again, speaking only of the Reform movement, there's a lot of resistance, from both congregants and rabbis, to letting lay people do some of the work. I don't know how we get better about that so we don't burn out our leaders. Moshe ended up appointing 70 elders to help him, but it wasn't his idea. How do we get more help for our leaders, and how do we get that help accepted? No answers, just questions.

That's not really the direction I expected this to go when I started writing, by the way. I was just going to comment on the load we place on our leaders and stop there.

Originally posted here: http://www.greatestjournal.com/users/cellio/955.html

assorted thoughts on Parshat Yitro (relevalation at Sinai)

Yes, Shavu'ot was a couple weeks ago, but between LJ outages and general busy-ness I haven't written about it before now.

My rabbi's tikkun leil Shavu'ot (late-night torah study for the holiday) always begins with a study of Exodus 19-20. This year I noticed, or had pointed out, things I had not previously noticed.

The first is in 19:1, which begins to set the scene. The text refers to a specific day, but instead of saying "bayom hahu" (on that day) it says "bayom hazeh", on this day. (My rabbi pointed this out.) There is a midrashic tradition that all the Jewish people, including (mystically) those not yet born, stood at Sinai; I wonder if this is related. Or, I wonder if it's part of the proof-text for the idea that revelation is ongoing. Or, maybe it's just a typo. :-)

A few verses later there's a bit of poetic repetition that I understand to be stylistic for biblical Hebrew -- God says "thus shall you say to the house of Ya'akov and tell the people of Israel". The house of Ya'akov and the people of Israel are, of course, one and the same. Saying and telling are similar; I wonder if there is nuance there or it's just part of the poetry. But something else struck me: the noun phrases there are "beit Ya'akov" and "b'nei Yisrael" (so "people" of Israel is a mistranslation; it says "sons of"). Is repetition just repetition, or does it try to hint at something? When you talk about your "house" you're looking backwards, to your ancestry; when you talk about your "sons" (or children) you're looking to the future. Maybe the torah is tellins us that both are important; this new enterprise isn't a clean slate (don't ignore your past) but it is a new opportunity (you can change going forward).

(Aside: I am growing to intensely dislike the translation "children of Israel". Too many people read it as "young children" and write divrei torah about how they needed to be taught as if newborns, couldn't be expected to think for themselves, etc. While they did need to be taught, that line of reasoning lets them off the hook for the things they did wrong, like the various rebellions. When someone becomes "bar mitzvah" ("bar" = "ben"; it's Araamic versus Hebrew) we say he's an adult. B'nei Yisrael were, likewise, adults. If we need a gender-neutral word, how about "descendants of Israel"?)

Another small thing: God says (to the people, via Moshe) "you have seen...how I carried you on eagles' wings". In talking about the exodus we talk a lot about divine might (including in the part of that verse I elided), but might alone, while impressive, probably wouldn't evoke buy-in from the people. Thus far they've seen a divine slug-fest; they might reasonably think that they're just trading one uncaring master for another. I think this might be the first indication to the people that it's (at least partly) about them and not just our God fighting it out with Egypt's false gods. The people probably needed that in order to be able to accept torah willingly instead of under duress. (Did they accept it willingly? That's another issue.)

The first and last of the ten commandments given directly to the people ("I am your God" and "don't covet") aren't about actions so much as intentions or belief. You can refrain from stealing or adultery, but refraining from the coveting that would lead you to steal or adulter seems a little less under your control. Judaism focuses more on action than belief, but you need both and maybe this bracketing of the active commandments is meant to indicate this.

Originally posted here: http://www.greatestjournal.com/users/cellio/1158.html

American Megafauna (3 players)

The two-player game went well; the four-player game bogged down and we aborted it. The next logical thing to try was a three-player game, which alaricmacconnal helped us out with this weekend.

We had in play the purple reptiles and the other two sets that were not "dogface". (One of these days I'll learn all the names.) One of the other players was the best (potential) herbivore and the other was the best (potential) carnivore, leaving me in the middle. Each species has advantages and disadvantages; I just haven't learned them all yet.

I went into the water, which seemed like a good idea at first but then the others started crowding me out. After one turn in which I was down to two counters and no obvious growth path, I was ready to resign but agreed to keep playing. In the next turn (turn 8, I think) we got a disaster that ended the game. Oops.

That took about an hour and a half, so we decided to start again. I suggested we juggle creatures around; in the end Dani and Alaric kept what they had and I swapped the lizards for "dogface", a mammal. Dogface's special trait is that individual creatures, as opposed to whole species, can be declared herbivore or carnivore. This seems nicely flexible. In practice, it's kind of a bookkeeping hassle.

For all players, you can have your carnivores prey on your herbivores (so long as they're different species). This led to comments like "it's ok; I brought my own food to this biome". :-) A problem for carnivores is that not all herbivores are equally edible; some develop roadrunner DNA (speed, nocturnality, armor), and you have to adapt (speed, nocturnality, anti-armor) to eat. The carnivores end up moving around, following the prey, just like in real life.

The other thing that can make an herbivore inedible is size, and that was my biggest problem in this game. There are six sizes available in the game; a carnivore can eat prey of its size or up to two bigger. I had a gene that I really didn't want to give up that constrained my best carnivore to size 1, but Dani was going for size 5 and 6 creatures because there are places where herbivores compete on size. It's complicated but mostly good.

That trait I didn't want to give up? I think this was a huge factor: I got a poisoned bite, which allowed me to ignore roadrunner DNA. (I don't understand, logically, why it would help with speed and nocturnality, though helping with armor makes sense.) In a previous game when I was playing a carnivore strategy the prey kept hiding or running away; since DNA comes out randomly and then you have to win the bidding, addressing this isn't always easy. But this time the luck ran in a different direction.

For a while Dani and Alaric were doing better on population than I was, but I managed to catch up and ended up winning by about five points (with top score around 150). Alaric would have instead won by one point if the disaster on the last turn hadn't made one of his species extinct. Ah, fickle fate.

The game seems to work best when players can fall into niches, but that's not always possible and a fair bit of conflict is inherent in the game. I think it works reasonably well, but the 3-player game came in at 5.5 hours, a little longer than I expected. Each player and each species adds complexity, so I think we need to come up with some player aids (visualization, mainly) before we try another 4-player game.