This is the second midrash we looked at in this session. (I previously knew this one, but reading it in Hebrew was still educational.)

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Last week I wrote about my first study session with our newest rabbi, but I didn't cover everything. After the midrash I previously wrote about we started a longer one.

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There are still some focused entries I want to write about NHC (at least two), but in the meantime, some shorter bits:

I saw a T-shirt there that said "good grammar costs nothing". That sentiment appeals to me on its own, but I've been noticing something else since I came home: I am finally inclined to not add "imahot" and "imoteinu" in all the places that the Reform siddur has added those words. The traditional prayers refer to (e.g.) "avoteinu", literally "our fathers", but I understand it more generally -- especially if you then go on to name some who are women. Hebrew doesn't have gender-neutral words -- so if in English I accept that "he" can be neuter, how much the moreso should I accept this in Hebrew? I've been told by people who know more about Hebrew than I do that these additions are structurally unsound from a grammatical perspective, but (despite it setting off my PC alarms) I've gone along with it. Now, after trying on the original phrasing for a while, I think I'm prepared to say that I don't make those additions except when leading in a community that expects them. (Just to be clear: I do insert the names Sarah, Rivka, Rachel, and Leah in the avot prayer. But I don't think we need to say "avoteinu v'imoteinu" everywhere as well.)

It occurred to me (too late to do anything about it) that the NHC institute would be a good environment in which to "try on" observances that I'm not sure I'm ready for. If I experiment "back home" with something like tzitzit, for instance, then there will be people (at least one even if I wear them in) who will notice right away, so there's a level of apparent commitment there. If I then decide that no, I'm not going to do this, I have to "unwind" that. On the other hand, if I try it for a week among people I'll mostly never see anywhere else, no harm done if it doesn't stick. I should remember this.

Note to self: NHC dress code is casual, including on Shabbat. You can dress up for Shabbat, but you don't need to. The two things I regret allocating limited carry-on-luggage space to are dressier clothers and a Hebrew-English Tanakh. I needed the latter for classes, but mine is hefty and maybe I could have arranged to borrow from a local?

A collection of posts about NHC institute is here.

I learned today that there is a full-service gas station on my way to/from work. I didn't know we had any of those locally. It's been years (probably decades); what is the conventional tip?

As I pulled up to an intersction (all-way stop), someone from the cross street was backing through the intersection. After backing into the space in front of my car, he immediately popped into drive and went through the intersection. Whose turn was that, the cross-street or mine? :-)

I have occasionally noticed (because of tracking/RSS feeds or because I viewed the journals directly) posts to LJ that did not show up on my friends page. Is this happening to anyone else? I haven't detected a pattern yet.

Why does Hebrew have two words for "open" that differ only (apparently) in what objects they take? It's peh-kuf-chet when talking about eyes and ears, and peh-taf-chet for anything else.

The torah (Deut 21:18-21) talks about the case of the ben soreir umoreh, the "stubborn and rebellious son". This is a capital offense; the rabbis were not eager to carry out death sentences, so they read this pretty closely looking for restrictions, which they found.

One of the lines of reasoning derives from the declaration the parents (both of them) must make about how he does not listen to "koleinu", our voice. It says voice, not voices, and this leads to questions about whether the parents used the same phrasing, the same diction, the same pitch, and so on. If the torah meant "kolloteinu" it would have said so, the rabbis reason.

This got me wondering a bit about language. You generally make a singular noun possessive by appending the right suffix (maybe with vowel tweaks), like "-nu" for "our". "Av" = father, "avinu" = our father, "avot" = fathers, "avoteinu" = our fathers. However, it doesn't work quite the same for masculine-form [1] nouns; "shir" = song, "shirim" = songs, "shireinu" = our... song? songs? There is no "shirimeinu" or "shirimnu" or the like; you don't see that construct. (Or so I have been taught, and it matches my experience. If you know otherwise please tell me.) What this seems to say is that for a masculine-form noun, the number in the possessive case is not absolutely, grammatically unambiguous.

Which leads me to wonder: was the ben soreir umoreh saved, in part, by a feminine noun? :-)

[1] I'm saying "masculine-form" rather than "masculine" because I used the "av" example, which I chose for familiarity. "Av" is masculine, but it follows the grammatical forms of feminine nouns.

Friday at work I completed a big merge of my project's code to the main branch in source control. (Yeah, two hours before leaving for a four-day weekend, but I'd done a lot of testing first.) I've learned some new things about Perforce (source-control system) and our build system. I have also learned that while I can do this sort of configuration management, I really, really want us to hire someone who actually wants to do this stuff on a regular basis.

This morning I was asked if I could read torah next Shabbat. ("How much?" "As long as it's a valid reading, I don't care what you do." "Ok.") This does get better with practice; I don't think I would have been able to learn a non-trivial chunk in less than a week a year ago. Cool.

Thursday we got email from our Hebrew instructor. She is, alas, sitting shiva in Israel, so she sent mail to tell us that (1) class was on anyway as originally scheduled and (2) we'd have the sub again. Only three people showed up; the sub told me that happened at the last class (three weeks ago) too (different three people; that was the night my in-laws were in town, so I missed it). The sub is good, so I hope she's not taking that personally. The bad student I previously wrote about wasn't there, so we actually covered new material. I suggested to the sub that she send email to everyone with the assignment and what we would be doing next week; with luck this will innoculate us some against "but I don't know this!" whines from people who miss classes and don't do the homework. We'll see.

I had a nice conversation with the sub on the way out of the building, and then for half an hour after that, about theology, observance, the local community, learning languages, and the like. That was pleasant. (And hey, we now have each others' email addresses...)

Today we visited with my family. They do Christmas, so Dani and I still do the gift thing with them for their sake. My parents got me two more volumes of Rashi's commentary on torah (yay!), and we got a bunch of other goodies. In a moment of "oh, you did that too? oops", both my parents and my sister got us nice tea assortments. Tonight we cleaned out the tea cupboard (I've been meaning to prune it for a while); who knew that tea had sell-by dates? (This revelation came when considering a box that neither of us remembered buying.) Mmm, new, fresh tea.

We got my sister an iPod (nano), which she was pretty excited about. She does not have a computer, but she has access to several nearby (her kids, our father, and if worse comes to worst she can come to our house, though it's farther for her). She has a long commute and no CD player in her car, so I figure she'll spend an afternoon loading a bunch of CDs onto her iPod and be good for a few months before needing to do it again. Not having a computer of her own shouldn't be a huge hardship, despite the protests of her kids. (We bought her an adapter to charge it from house current and an adapter for playing in her car.)

My father just got a laptop (Macbook), apparently prompted in part by the thought during their trip to Italy that it would have been convenient to have. (Duh; if I'd thought of it I would have lent them my iBook for that trip.) So he's now playing with Leopard, 'cause that's what came installed. He mentioned that he still has a G3 machine (predecessor to his desktop machine); I wonder if it can run iTunes. :-)

Tomorrow I'm getting together with friends to play a game of "Dogs in the Vineyard", an unusual role-playing game I previously wrote about. This should be fun!

(Not dead, just busy. :-) )

Term heard at work: heinosity, as in "the heinosity of this bug is higher than the heinosity of the bad interface fixing it would introduce". I know that "heinousness" is already a word (at least in some dictionaries), but this version is more striking, perhaps by analogy with "bogosity".

(Speaking of vocabulary, I used the "word" "gogetitude" in describing a job candidate recently. People laughed and knew exactly what I meant. :-) )

I got the Golden Compass daemon generator to work a few days ago. I don't know what the different critters mean, but so far mine has morphed from a tiger to a spider to, err, some sort of feline (I'm not sure what that is). There's still time for you guys to go adjust it if you like.

I got a letter today reminding me that my biblical-Hebrew class starts tomorrow. That was polite of them (I signed up weeks ago), but the time in the letter is different from the time in the original catalogue. I wonder which is correct. Fortunately, the letter includes a phone number.

The gas stations I use most often have two rows of (double-sided) pumps, so there are four "lanes" to pull into. These can be approached from either side. Depending on which side of your car holds the access point, you will want either left sides or right sides. You would think it would be possible to develop some sort of convention, so that two lanes go in each direction, one lefty and one righty, but it never seems to work itself out on its own. ("Use the pumps to your right" doesn't seem hard to me...) Tonight while getting gas I waited almost as long for shuffling as for actual fill-ups by people ahead of me. Whee. (Now there's an argument for fuel-efficient cars: reduce trips to the gas station! :-) )

For those wondering what happened with that online talmud-study effort I mentioned a few days ago: the originator started a mailing list and said we'll be starting with introductory stuff (not daf yomi any time soon), and I've heard nothing more from the URJ person. Actual study has not yet commenced. They've announced a book, which sounds so basic that I won't spend money on it but I'll borrow it from a library if I can.

It turns out that one of my coworkers has an MA in religious studies, used to be reasonably proficient in biblical Hebrew (with some clues about Aramaic too), and is interested in using that knowledge. Who knew?

So we're going to see if we can figure out some way to structure a one-lunch-slot-a-week session doing...something. I'm thinking that we can't go wrong by starting with straight translation; I'll bring in printouts of some narrative passages from torah (or maybe Joshua, Samuel, or Kings, but I can easily print torah), and read together. Printouts (as opposed to books) are important so we can mark up the Hebrew text to mark roots, grammar thingies, and the like.

Whee!

(So why did this person not respond to the note on my wiki page saying (in Hebrew) "if you can read this please talk to me"? Because she, like I, does not know modern conversational Hebrew.)

I'm reading torah in a couple weeks, so last week I started looking at the portion I'm doing. I was able to translate most of it without aid. That was a pleasant surprise (though it's also not a hard passage). There were a few verbs I didn't know (like "strip"), for which I do not feel in the least bad.

I noticed an unusual construction in this portion (Chukat, chamishi), and I wonder what it means. (I haven't gone looking for commentaries yet.) Generally in biblical Hebrew double-noun constructions (which probably have a formal grammatical name) are "noun [implied "of"] noun", like "b'nei Yisrael" = "children of Israel". Har Sinai (har = mountain) is where we received torah. The beit t'filah is the house (beit) of prayer (t'filah). And so on. So I was a little surprised to see the phrase "hor ha-har" (= Mount Hor, but literally Hor the mountain) used consistently in this passage. "Har Hor" might sound a little funny, but is it grammatically unsound in some way I don't understand? Is this kind of stylistic variation really all over the place but I'm only now noticing it?

I chanted torah this morning and translated from the scroll. (My next assignment is Vayakheil-Pekudei, which I'm guessing will be obscure-enough text that I won't be able to do that.) Here's my translation of the fifth aliya of parshat Bo (literal first, then notes, then a looser one that flows better):

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