a few Rosh Hashana links

[cellio]

Sunday evening our associate rabbi gave a sermon (video link) on how we use words to include or exclude. Readers of this journal will recognize the talmudic tale she includes. (So will lots of other people; it's kind of famous.) It's easy for discourses on this topic to be pat bordering on dismissive of real human complexities, but this talk was more nuanced. When she posts a text copy I'll add a link, but for now all I have is a video (~20 minutes).

Monday morning our senior rabbi spoke about pachad, deep fear (video link, ~21 minutes; text). I'm not going to try to summarize it.

I chanted torah on the second day. I didn't realize it was being streamed/recorded until somebody told me on Shabbat. Since it was, I'll share video evidence for anybody who wants to know what I'm talking about when I talk about chanting torah. (That's high-holy-day trop or cantillation, which is different from how we chant on Shabbat.) I decided fairly late to do my own translation from the scroll; by default my rabbi would have read it out of the book. It's not a hard translation, but word order is different between Hebrew and English, which is why there are some brief pauses in places you might not expect just knowing the English. (Also, I never really did settle on a good English word for rakiah; I've heard several.)

Comments

[goljerp]

Ah, I'd forgotten it was mincha. Possibly because I'm usually fasting during Yom Kippur? :-)

(Or, more likely, I often nap between services and so miss the mincha Torah reading...)

I read an interesting commentary a little while ago which looked at the language (which is kinda wierd) in this section and used that to build a case that originally the section included forbidden homosexual relationships (i.e. a man couldn't sleep with his uncle). They used that to reason that, at the time, other homosexual relationships were not forbidden. At some later point, the text was changed to what we have now.

However, as intellectually interesting as that may be, I can totally see not wanting to read that on Yom Kippur mincha.