Toldot

The sixth aliya of yesterday's portion is particularly poignant and the trope helps amplify it, so before reading I gave an overview to help people listen for it. I said approximately:

In this week's parsha Yitzchak, now old and blind, blesses his sons before his death. In the fifth aliyah Yaakov tricks his father into thinking he's Esav; Yitzchak is initially doubtful but then accepts the deception. (Rashi says one of the reasons he doubted is that "Esav" was too polite.) The aliyah I'm about to read begins with Yitzchak's blessing of Yaakov. After this Yaakov will leave and, in the very same verse, Esav will come in for his blessing. When Yitzchak hears Esav he trembles, saying "then who was that?", and when they realize what has happened Esav begs his father -- "barcheini gam ani, avi", "bless me too, father". You can hear the desperation in the trope. Yitzchak responds that Yaakov took his blessing, and not only that, but listen to what I gave him. Esav begs his father again, asking "have you only one blesing?", and repeats his plea, "barcheini gam ani avi".

D'var torah:

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ah, technology

This afternoon my (relatively-new) cell phone made a noise I hadn't heard before. (Kind of disturbing, actually; must try to fix.) When I investigated, I found a text message from a coworker reporting that his wife had just seen for sale (location given) something I had recently said I'd been having trouble finding. This prompted several immediate thoughts:

1. My plan does text messages?

2. How do people learn to type on those things? It took me at least a minute to compose my two-word reply. (Skipping punctuation would have been faster but out of character.) He sent a grammatically-correct paragraph without any cutesy IMisms. Granted, I don't know what device he used to send it.

3. Where did he get my phone number? (I can ask him that one tomorrow.) My land-line number is readily available, but I haven't given my cell number out to coworkers. I tried Googling for my own number and found sites willing to sell it to me but none willing to give it to me.

Heh. I learned some things today, and will learn one more tomorrow when I ask my coworker about #3. Meanwhile, purchase mission accomplished thanks to this message.